A Machine Vision System for Generating Vehicle Trajectories over Extended Freeway Segments

An advanced machine vision system is presented that automatically extracts vehicle trajectories over long freeway sections from video data. For each vehicle, its dimension and initial position are robustly given by the vehicle detection algorithm, and a separate tracking algorithm is used to extract the vehicle’s trajectory from the images of multiple cameras. The algorithms overcome the limitations of machine vision algorithms previously proposed that have difficulty to robustly obtain accurate vehicle positions in the presence of shadows and occlusions. Using the system, we generated a prototype dataset of over 4,700 individual vehicles, or 2.8M data points, which is the largest and most comprehensive dataset on vehicle trajectories ever produced.