Airborne moving vehicle detection for urban traffic surveillance

At present, moving vehicle detection on airborne platform has been an important technology for urban traffic surveillance. In such a situation, most commonly used methods (e.g. image subtraction) could hardly work well because of some additional difficulties such as slow movement of vehicles and jam. This paper proposed a new moving vehicle detection method named MVD-RD for airborne urban traffic surveillance. First, the non-road regions are extracted using road detection technique. Secondly, the non-road regions with no vehicles are removed according to their size. As a result of this two-stage regions shrinkage, the detection area reduces a lot. Finally, to the reduced area, image subtraction is used to get all moving regions and then moving vehicles can be accurately filtered in a simple way. The experimental results show that, compared with traditional image subtraction methods used in airborne moving vehicle detection, the proposed MVD-RD method achieves much better performance in detection rate, false alarm rate, and detection speed.