Camera Calibration for Urban Traffic Scenes: Practical Issues and a Robust Approach

Video-based collection of traffic data is on the rise. Camera calibration is a necessary step in all applications to recover the real-world positions of the road users of interest that appear in the video. Camera calibration can be performed based on feature correspondences between the real-world space and image space as well as appearances of parallel lines in the image space. In urban traffic scenes, the field of view may be too limited to allow reliable calibration based on parallel lines. Calibration can be complicated in the case of incomplete and noisy data. It is common that cameras monitoring traffic scenes are installed before calibration was undertaken. In this case, laboratory calibration, which is taken for granted in many current approaches, is impossible. This work addresses various real world challenging cases, for example when only video recordings are available, with little knowledge on the camera specifications and setting location, when the orthographic image of the intersection is outdated, or when neither an orthographic image nor a detailed map is available. A review of the current methods for camera calibration reveals little attention to these practical challenges that arise when studying urban intersections to support applications in traffic engineering. This study presents the development details of a robust camera calibration approach based on integrating a collection of geometric information found in urban traffic scenes in a consistent optimization framework. The developed approach was tested on six datasets obtained from urban intersections in British Columbia, California, and Kentucky. The results clearly demonstrated the robustness of the proposed approach.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Ismail, Karim
  • Sayed, Tarek
  • Saunier, Nicolas
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 89th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2010-1-10 to 2010-1-14
• Date: 2010

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p
• Monograph Title: TRB 89th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Calibration; Geometric elements; Mathematical models; Pedestrian vehicle interface; Pedestrians; Perspective views; Traffic surveillance; Video cameras
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01154640
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 10-2715
• Files: BTRIS, TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Apr 14 2010 7:14AM