2011 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Systems
An implementation of Moving Object Detection, Tracking and Counting Objects for
Traffic Surveillance System
Yoginee B. Bramhe(Pethe)
Comp. Sci. and Engg Dept,
R.C.E.R.T., Chandrapur M.S. India.
nutanbramhe@rediffmail.com,
Abstract— Moving vehicle detection in digital image sequences
is one of the key technologies of Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITS). Traffic Surveillance System is being more and
important with the enlarging of urban scale and increasing
number of vehicles. This Paper presents an intelligent vehicle
counting method based on blob analysis in traffic surveillance.
The algorithm is composed of moving object segmentation,
blob analysis, and tracking. By analyzing the blob of vehicles,
the meaningful features are extracted. In addition, the speed of
each vehicle and the vehicle flow through a predefined area can
be calculated by analyzing blobs of vehicles. The experimental
results show that the proposed system can provide useful
information for traffic surveillance. We analyze the procedure
of video-based traffic congestion system and divide it into
graying, binarization, denosing and moving target detection.
The system first reads video and converts them into grayscale
images. We also put forward a Boundary block detection
algorithm with noise reduction to identify the moving objects.
Keywords— Binarization; Background Substraction; Boundary
Detection; Detection Of Moving Vehicles(Object Detection);
Finding Speed; Counting Vehicles;
I. INTRODUCTION
The large increase of the vehicles is making the roads full
results in lot of traffic jam and it becoming more critical
day by day. So, the detection to vehicles is of great
importance. Video tracking system is the most popular way
of detection due to its enormous advantage. It uses the fixed
and still camera for continuous surveillance, deals and
analyses the picked serial pictures and frame, in order to
identify and track the moving object correctly. Automated
visual surveillance is currently a hot topic in computer
vision research. A common approach is to perform
background subtraction, which identifies moving objects
from the sequence of video frames that differs significantly
from a background model. As a basic, the background image
must be a representation of the scene with no moving
objects and must be kept regularly updated. There are many
challenges in developing a good background subtraction
algorithm. Moving object detection techniques have been
studied extensively for such purposes as video content
analysis as well as remote surveillance. Traffic congestion
monitoring is being more and important with the enlarging
of urban scale and increasing number of vehicles. Video-
based traffic congestion monitoring systems are widely used
now but it relies on the high performance of hardware.The
urbanization impels the increasing of traffic flow. As we
978-0-7695-4587-5/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CICN.2011.28
P.S. Kulkarni
Information Technology. Dept.
R.C.E.R.T. ,Chandrapur M.S. India .
kulkarnips1811@gmail.com
know, traffic control is a complex issue, it requires
monitoring, but on the other hand the data processed by the
monitoring system are huge causing high throughput
computation. Recently, with the development of computer,
network, image processing, transmission technology, and
hardware, video monitoring systems are widely used in
different domains and areas. But most of them rely on high
Performance of hardware, limiting effectiveness and
efficiency, especially in accuracy and response. Hence we
will focus on optimization of the video based traffic
congestion monitoring system, mainly in image processing
and moving target detection. There are many ways to track
the moving object. Most of them use the frame differences
to analysis the moving object and obtain object boundary,
which may be quite time consuming. In order to reduce the
computation cost, a more efficient way is expected. From
this point of view, a new moving object detection algorithm
is forwarded called Boundary Block detection algorithm .
Overall works are software development of a system that
requires a video stream or single image. They consist of the
following components: background without any moving
objects and the scene with moving objects. The system is
designed that finds the boundary of the moving objects and
find the number of moving objects from the video scene.
The object detection and counting system consists of six
major components: 1) Image Acquisition 2) Image
Enhancement 3) Image Segmentation 4) Image Analysis 5)
Object Counting, and 6) Reports.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section
II gives the overview of the related work., Section III
describes the background subtraction of vehicle object,
Section IV describes the vehicle detection and segmentation
, Section V gives idea of vehicle counting and vehicle
tracking, Section VI is the architecture and modeling of
developed methodology, Section VII shows implementation ,
Section VIII contains experimental results and Section IX
contains the concluding remarks.
II. OVERVIEW OF THE RELATED WORK
At present, there are lots of applications in the field of
traffic surveillance and video monitoring. They are mainly
about how to use systems in certain areas to save labor and
improve efficiency and security, e.g. video-based
monitoring system for mine area management. Optimization
for monitoring system usually aims at improving system
efficiency and seeks for better performance with fewer
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resources. Image process in monitoring systems leads to
study on image processing methods. Researchers improve
algorithms to achieve better performance. However, most of
them merely aim at image processing and separating from
concrete monitoring application. When working, video-
based traffic congestion monitoring system will get video
data, transmit data, conduct processing and return result. We
will mainly discuss on the steps involving in data processing
and complex computing which influence system
performance immensely, consisting of graying, binarization,
denoising and moving object detection.
M.Sankari and C. Meena [1] have proposed a
methodology to perform background subtraction from
moving vehicles in traffic video sequences that combines
statistical assumptions of moving objects using the previous
frames. It is necessary to update the background image
frequently in order to guarantee reliability of the motion
detection. For that, a binary moving objects hypothesis mask
is constructed to classify any group of lattices as being from
a moving object based on the optimal threshold. Then, the
new incoming information is integrated into the current
background image using a Kalman filter. H.S. Mohana,
Aswatha Kumar and Shiva kumar [2] focus on a tracking
strategy that can robustly track and classify the objects
within a fixed environment. They have defined a robust
model-based tracker and classifier using kalman filtering
combined with pixel scanner. Vibha L, Chetana Hegde, P
Deepa Shenoy, Venugopal K R, L M Patnaik[3] describe a
technique for identifying a moving object in a video clip of
stationary background for content based multimedia
communication systems. They presented a framework for
detecting some important but unknown knowledge like
vehicle identification and traffic flow count.
M. Vargas,S. L. Toral, F. Barrero, J.M. Milla,[4] focused
on background subtraction, which is a very common
technique for detecting moving objects from image
sequences using a static camera.
For foreground analysis [19] [20], a method for foreground
analysis was proposed for moving object, shadow, and ghost
by combining the motion information. The computation cost
is relatively expensive for real-time video surveillance
systems because of the computation of optical flow.
III. BACKGROUND SUBTRACTION OF VEHICLE
OBJECT
Background extraction is an important part of moving
object detection algorithms that are very useful in
surveillance systems. Moving object detection algorithm is
simple when a clean background image is available. Method
of background extraction during training sequence and
updating it during input frame sequence is called
background modeling. The detection and tracking of color
moving target maybe use gray-scale image sequences
converted from the original color image sequence. This is
determined by the purpose of motion detection. Based on
the results of background subtraction, we can then realize
object extraction: Firstly getting background image from
previous processing, then subtracting it from full image
getting from original video sequence’s frame. We apply
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binarization on this subtraction result and get moving
vehicle objects. For each pixels in the frame, we judge the
value difference with the corresponding value in background
image. If the difference is higher than a threshold, we regard
it as foreground and output 1,otherwise as background and
output 0. Finally, each 1 or 0 construct a binarization image
and finish object extraction of Vehicle processing.
Threshold segmentation method is mainly used in this
object extraction stage, after obtaining background image,
we use background subtraction to obtain the object. In this
processing, a proper threshold will have a important impact
on object extraction. All the gray pixels is greater than the
threshold were set to 255 (white), and all the less than the
threshold were set to 0 (black). As the constantly changing
of forward image and background image, it can not use a
fixed threshold to split each frame image, so for different
images in each frame we must select a most appropriate
threshold for segmentation.
IV. VEHICLE DETECTION AND SEGMENTATION
The processing of vehicle object detection is that devising
foreground object (vehicle) from background real time from
video sequence, i.e. the subtraction of foreground and
background. Such object detection is the main part of digital
image processing technique, and form the basis of follow up
high level processing tasks such as recognition and tracking
system. There exist two stages to realize object detection:
background subtraction, object extraction. In this system,
the input signals are color video sequences.The useful
message is moveable vehicle object. Firstly, we extract
background in each fame, then using subtraction with still
frame and binarization, we can get movable object image,
and this result is object extraction.
Generally, the traffic–camera is usually set at a certain
site and hence the background is stationary. For this reason,
the background subtraction is suitable to be employed to
detect the moving vehicles in the process of change
detection. Initially, a static background is derived to be a
reference frame and then frame-difference technique is used
for change detection.
V. VEHICLE COUNTING AND VEHICLE TRACKING
In order to achieve the vehicle-flow counting, the
proposed method will track each moving vehicle within
successive image frames. However, after segmenting
moving objects, these objects with their bounding boxes and
centroids are extracted from each frame. Intuitively, two
objects that are spatially closest in the adjacent frames are
connected. Besides, the area of a vehicle is also considered
for enhancing the vehicle tracking. For each object in the
current frame, an object with the minimum distance and
similar size between two consecutive frames needs to be
searched in the previous frame.
VI ARCHITECTURE AND MODELING OF
DEVELOPED METHODOLOGY
Developed work is an efficient moving object detection,
tracking & counting objects using boundary block detection
for traffic surveillance system. Based on the analysis of
projection of the 2D motion of objects, the information of
motion field is exploited to make moving object detection
more efficient. Fig 1 shows the Vehicle Detection and Counting
system Architecture.
Fig. 1. Vehicle detection and counting system architecture
The discontinuities of motion vector field on the
boundaries of moving objects enable us to detect the moving
objects blocks in which the potential boundaries of the
moving objects locate.
The Paper consists of a video clip which is a sequence of
traffic images in AVI format, the objectives are:
Steps:
1. A video clip in the format of AVI for traffic surveillance
is taken.
2. Detectection of a moving object using the concept of
boundary block detection algorithm.
3. Improve the clarity of the moving object and compare it
with the already existing algorithms.
4. Develop a vision based surveillance system capable of
identifying vehicles in the scene.
(b) To track the vehicles as they progress along the image
sequence.
(c) To count the number of vehicles in the image.
Assumptions: The background of a video sequence is
stationary.
VII. IMPLEMENTATION AND EXPECTED
RESULTS
MOVING OBJECT DETECTION ALGORITHMS
In this section, we are developing object detection
algorithms which are introduced step by step as detecting
boundary blocks, writing chain codes, and detecting
boundaries in the boundary blocks, where the boundary
block is defined as a block containing boundary of a certain
moving object.To simplify the moving object boundary
detection, some assumptions are drawn:
1. At most two objects’ boundaries in one block;
2. The boundary of moving object is a simple closed curve.
A. Boundary Block Detection
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At first, we have detected the blocks containing moving
object boundaries by using the information of the motion
vector field generated by video compression. The motion
vector derived by motion estimation is the common motion
vector for all pixels in one block. However, we can assume
it is the motion vector of the critical points locating in the
centroid of each block. As mentioned above, pixels in the
same object should satisfy the condition of linear
interpolation. Hence the critical points in one moving
objects should satisfy this condition. When this condition is
violated, the discontinuity of motion vector field exist and
imply the existence of the boundary in associated block.
Then the algorithm detecting blocks containing moving
object boundaries is as follows:
B. Moving object block detection Algorithm
1) Scan along horizontal direction, for three consecutive
critical points P1, P2, P3, which are central points of each
block and satisfying
2P2 = P1 + P3, if 2vP2 ≠ vP1 + vP3 , then P2 might be a
boundary block.
2) Scan along vertical direction, for three consecutive
critical points P1, P2, P3, which are central points of each
block and satisfying 2P2 = P1 + P3, if 2vP2 ≠ vP1 + vP3 ,
then P2 might be a boundary block. Now the possible
boundary blocks are selected, for further verification,
another condition is provided.
3) For six consecutive critical points P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P6,
which are in a same line, and P3, P4, P5 are possible
boundary blocks, while P1, P2, P6 are not.
The central block P4 is the boundary block. Then we
describe the boundary blocks by chain code. 8-neighboring
connectivity is used here. The number 0 to 7 denotes
neighboring blocks. Initial search starts from block 0, then
round the target block, from block 1 to block 7. During the
search, once a neighboring block is found as a boundary
block, then the search will stop and the neighboring block
will be regarded as current target block to start 8
neighboring blocks search iteratively. Implementation
procedure for moving object detection, tracking and
counting of object for traffic surveillance system is given
below :
We have implemented this steps one by one and for that we
have taken different frames to work properly. We
formulated the problem in a sequential manner .We planned
our work according to the following steps. We planned
different step with different set of operation will take place
at each step and the output of that step will be used as the
input to the other step. Each step is in incharge of specific
function which it will perform on each frame of the video
sequence and the final result of that step will be used in the
another step and each step will follow the same things..The
formulation of steps are defined as follows in fig2-

Fig.2 Flowchart of the implemented moving object detection for traffic
surveillance system.
A. Reading of frame from a video sequence
Firstly we have taken a video and then read all the frame in
the video by the matlab function Aviread.The process of this
is explained below.
Movie= aviread(videoFile,Frameno);
The function aviread is used to extract a frame from the
video, where movieFile is the path of the movie file and
frameNo is the number of frame to be extracted. The
function will extract the entire frame and will store it into
the Movie.
B. Getting Number Of Frames
To get number of frame from a video I use the following
function.
numFrames = get(videoFile, 'numberOfFrames');
C. Background Reference Image
A background reference image is required for background
substraction. It will be used to as reference to every new
frame which will result in the outline of objects and their
shadows. I used the first frame of every video as the
background reference image. The Background reference
need not necessary that it will be first frame of the video
sequence but it can be other frames also. The background
reference image is stored in a variable matrics which will be
used in further processing of the image.
D. Normalizing the RGB factor in each frame
First extract the background reference image which is
generally the first frame of the sequence.
For Normalization we will do the following things:
N=R+G+B
N= Summation of Each color in a frame
R=R/N ,G=G/N , B=B/N;
R= Red Color ,G=Gray color, B=Blue
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In this step we will do preprocessing for the background
reference image and also for the subsequent frame of the
given video. This is done to remove the change of intensity
in any frame. Converting an RGB image into normalized
RGB removes the effect of any intensity variations
C. Graying
Grayscale image has no color information. It only
contains brightness data of the image. By graying, the
system converts colorful image which contains brightness
and color information to the one which has only brightness
data. Graying is an important step in image processing,
whose output is the foundation of subsequent processing. As
most images captured by monitoring devices are 24-bit
bitmap,
we suppose the images discussed in the paper are 24-bit
ones. We conduct graying by equation 1.
Y=0.30 ×R+0.59×G+ 0.11×B (1)
Here R, G and B represent values of red, green and blue
components of a point respectively. After being grayed,
color image merely loses color information that is useless to
monitoring system, which will not influence final result.
D. Binarization
Binarization divides images into two parts: foreground
one and background one. The key of binarization is the
selection of threshold. Now, global threshold method and
local threshold method are in common use. Global threshold
method uses a unique value as threshold for binarization.
Local threshold method uses thresholds of each sub-image
separated from grayscale. Global threshold method is simple
but easy to be interfered , local threshold method has better
effect but is slow due to more computing.
For monitoring system, local threshold method will slow
down overall response. Experiments show that factors such
as brightness which interfere in selection of global threshold
method do not have prominent impact on monitoring.
Taking all factors into consideration, we choose global
threshold method.
VIII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
We have evaluated the proposed approach using
continuous images in traffic scenes. Since the data are
collected from different environmental conditions by fixed
cameras, the backgrounds can be considered approximately
static, even though not completely stationary due to waving
tree phenomena and something else. An experiment carried
out in daytime demonstrates how to convert image into
grayscal along with ,boundary detection, counting, finding
distance between vehicles and estimating speed as shown in
fig. 3,fig 4 , fig 5 ,fig 6 and fig 7 respectively.
 Fig. 5 Result Of Finding Distance Between The vehicles (a) Input Image.
(b) Binarization of Image (c) Watershed Connected Components
(d) Distance In Meters

a) Input Image(Image Acquisition b) Background Image

Fig. 6 Result of main screen shots finding distance between the vehicles

c) Binarization of Image d) Gray Image

Fig.7. Main screenshot for speed estimation

e) Detecting Boundary f) Color based segmentation) IX. CONCLUSION

Fig. 3 Result vehicle segmentation. a)Input Image b) Background Image
c)Binarization of Image d) Gray Image e) Detecting Boundary f) Color
based segmentation
Fig. 4 Result of Vehicle counting Count is 2 (Two vehicles found)
a) Input Image(Image Acquisition b) Binarization
The Traffic surveillance system aims at developing the
system which can provide an overview and analysis of the
methods commonly used to define detail boundaries in each
boundary block. The system also implements to determine
the limitations of the methods which are discussed, when
considering their use in finding object, finding object using
Background suppression, counting the number of vehicles
and finding the distance between two moving objects. In this
paper, an efficient moving object detection algorithm is
developed. A background reference image technique is used
to construct reliable background information from the video
sequence. Then, each incoming frame is compared with the
background image. If the luminance value of a pixel differ
significantly from the background image, the pixel is
marked as moving object, otherwise, the pixel is regarded as
background. Finally, a post-processing step is used to
remove noise regions and produce a more smooth shape
boundary. In this way, many situations which may cause
trouble in conventional approaches can be handled properly
without using complicated operations. After enhancement,
the various methods like conversion from RGB to gray
image, binarization algorithms, thresholding and watershed
algorithm are used for the segmentation of the image. It can
be seen in the final output that it is working very good and
accurately. It is detecting the moving object according to its
boundary fulfilling the paper objectives and requirements.
The above algorithms can be used in different applications
like moving object tracking, vehicle counter and traffic
controlling.

c)Watershed connected components d) Distance In Meters X. FUTURE WORK

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