Practical camera calibration from moving objects for traffic scene surveillance

We address the problem of camera calibration for traffic scene surveillance, which supplies a connection between 2-D image features and 3-D measurement. It is helpful to deal with appearance distortion related to view angles, establish multiview correspondences, and make use of 3-D object models as prior information to enhance surveillance performance. A convenient and practical camera calibration method is proposed in this paper. With the camera height H measured as the only user input, we can recover both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the camera based on redundant information supplied by moving objects in monocular videos. All cases of traffic scene layouts are considered and corresponding solutions are given to make our method applicable to almost all kinds of traffic scenes in reality. Numerous experiments are conducted in different scenes, and experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and practicability of our approach. It is shown that our approach can be effectively adopted in all kinds of traffic scene surveillance applications.