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Published in IET Intelligent Transport Systems

Received on 13th November 2008
Revised on 20th August 2009
doi: 10.1049/iet-its.2008.0092

ISSN 1751-956X

Video sensor network for real-time trafc

monitoring and surveillance
T. Semertzidis K. Dimitropoulos A. Koutsia N. Grammalidis
Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 1st km Thermi-Panorama Road,
Thessaloniki 57001, Greece
E-mail: ngramm@iti.gr

Abstract: Sensor networks and associated infrastructures become ever more important to the trafc monitoring
and control because of the increasing trafc demands in terms of congestion and safety. These systems allow
authorities not only to monitor the trafc state at the detection sites, but also to obtain real-time related
information (e.g. trafc loads). This study presents a real-time vision system for automatic trafc monitoring
based on a network of autonomous tracking units (ATUs) that capture and process images from one or more
pre-calibrated cameras. The proposed system is exible, scalable and suitable for a broad eld of applications,
including trafc monitoring of tunnels at highways and aircraft parking areas at airports. Another objective of
this work is to test and evaluate different image processing and data fusion techniques in order to be
incorporated to the nal system. The output of the image processing unit is a set of information for each
moving object in the scene, such as target ID, position, velocity and classication, which are transmitted to a
remote trafc control centre, with remarkably low bandwidth requirements. This information is analysed and
used to provide real-time output (e.g. alerts, electronic road signs, ramp meters etc.) as well as to extract
useful statistical information (trafc loads, lane changes, average velocity etc.).

1 Introduction trafc monitoring, the visual tracking problem is

Increasing trafc demands render necessary the use of
intelligent systems for monitoring, control and
management of trafc. These systems support trafc data
collection mechanisms along with intelligent incident
detection and prediction models as well as dynamic
applications of data analysis techniques for target
classication. Improved management of trafc is expected
to alleviate present and future congestion and safety
problems in a broad eld of trafc applications (highways,
airports etc.). One approach for addressing this need is by
using new imaging technologies stemming from the
signicant advances in the eld of computer vision. Video
surveillance along with advanced computer vision methods
is already in use and provides signicant aid to human
trafc control operators in trafc monitoring and
management tasks. However, robust and accurate detection
and tracking of moving objects still remains a difcult
problem for the majority of computer vision applications.
Especially in the case of outdoor video surveillance, such as
particularly challenging because of illumination of
background changes, occlusion problems etc.
Many commercial and research systems use video
processing, aiming to solve specic problems in trafc
monitoring. An efcient application for monitoring and
surveillance from multiple cameras is the reading people
tracker (RPT) [1], which was later used as a base for the
development of a system called AVITRACK, which
monitors airplane servicing operations [2]. An example of a
commercial system for monitoring and controlling road
trafc is Autoscopew Solo Wide Area Video Vehicle
Detection System [3], which was also used in the FP5
INTERVUSE project [4], for the development of an
articial vision network-based system for monitoring the
ground trafc at airports. Other commercial products for
road trafc monitoring are VisioPad [5], VideoTrak 910
[6], TrafCam [7], Vantage Iteris Monitoring Video
Detection System [8] and ABT2000 [9]. In Vitus-1 study
[10], more video-based systems especially for tunnel

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applications are presented. Moreover, several studies have
been made on the evaluation of trafc video systems.
Specically, the University of Utah has summarised a status
of detector technologies [11], whereas the NIT project
(non-intrusive technologies) of University of Minnesota
evaluates technologies for trafc detection [12]. Recently,
the Texas Transportation Institute has presented an
investigation of vehicle detector performance, in which four
video image vehicle detection systems are tested [13].
In this paper, we present a novel multi-camera video
surveillance system, which supports functionalities such as
detection, tracking and classication of objects moving
within the supervised area. Whereas the majority of existing
commercial and research trafc surveillance systems have
been designed to cope with specic scenarios, the proposed
system is applicable to a broad eld of trafc surveillance
applications (highways, airports, tunnels etc.). Its main
advantages are extensibility, parameterisation and its
capability to support various image processing and data
fusion techniques so as to be easily adaptable to different
trafc conditions.
More specically, the system is based on a network of
intelligent autonomous tracking units (ATUs), which
capture and process images from a network of pre-
calibrated visual sensors. ATUs provide results to a central
sensor data fusion (SDF) server, which is responsible for
tracking and visualising moving objects in the scene as well
as collecting statistics and providing alerts when specic
situations are detected. In addition, depending on the
available network bandwidth, images captured from specic
video sensors may also be coded and transmitted to the
SDF server, to allow inspection by a human observer (e.g.
trafc controller). The topology of the ATUs network
varies in each application depending on the existing
infrastructure, geomorphologic facts and/or bandwidth as
well as cost limitations. The network architecture is based on
a wired or wireless transmission control protocol and internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) connection. These topologies can be
combined to produce a hybrid network of ATUs. The
proposed solution has been developed within the framework
of TRAVIS (TRAfc VISual monitoring) research project. In
our previous publications [1416], we presented evaluation
results from the supported image processing and data fusion
techniques. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of the
overall systems performance in two completely different
trafc scenarios such as tunnels and airports.
2 ATUs
Each ATU is a powerful processing unit (PC or embedded
PC), which periodically obtains frames from one or more
video sensors. The video sensors are standard closed-circuit
television (CCTV) cameras equipped with a casing
appropriate for outdoor use and telephoto lenses for distant
observation. They are also static (xed eld of view) and
pre-calibrated. Each ATU consists of the following modules:
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Calibration module (off-line unit to calibrate each video
sensor): To obtain the exact position of the targets in the
real world, the calibration of each camera is required, so
that any point can be converted from image coordinates
(measured in pixels from the top left corner of the image)
to ground coordinates and vice versa. A calibration
technique, which is based on a 3  3 homographic
transformation and uses both points and lines
correspondences, was used [17]. The observed targets are
small with respect to the distance from the video sensors
and they are moving on a ground surface, which therefore
can be approximated by a plane. For the calibration of a
camera the world coordinates of at least four points (or
lines) within its eld of view as well as their corresponding
image coordinates are required. In case of cameras with
partially overlapping eld of views relative calibration with
respect to an already calibrated camera can be used. For
this purpose, a tool for calibrating camera pairs with
partially overlapping eld of views was developed. The tool
visualises the camera views, one of which is the calibrated
view according to which the other camera is calibrated. It
then allows the user to specify corresponding points on the
two views before it warps them on the ground plane as
shown in Fig. 1. The procedure is repeated until all
cameras with partially overlapping eld of views are
calibrated.
Background extraction and update module: Each ATU of
the system can automatically deal with background changes
(e.g. grass or trees moving in the wind) or lighting changes
(e.g. day, night etc.) supporting several robust background
extraction algorithms, namely mixture of Gaussians
modelling [18], Bayes algorithm [19], Lluis Miralles
Bastidas method [20] and non-parametric modelling [21].
In experimental results presented in our previous
publications [14, 15], the non-parametric modelling
emerges as the one having the best trade-off between
results quality and execution times.
Foreground segmentation module: Connected component
labelling is applied to identify individual foreground objects.
Blob tracking module (optional): The multiple hypothesis
tracker [22] was used, although association and tracking of
very fast moving objects may be problematic.
Blob classication module: A set of classes of moving
objects (e.g. person, car etc.) is initially dened for each
application. Then, each blob is classied by calculating its
membership probability of each class, using a previously
trained back-propagation neural network. Specically, nine
attributes, characteristic of its shape and size, are used as
input to a neural network: the two sizes of the major and
minor axes of the blobs ellipse and the seven Hu moments
[23] of the blob that are invariant to both rotations and
translations. The number of outputs of the neural network
equals to the predened number of classes. The class is
determined by the maximum output value.
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Figure 1 Two camera views with partially overlapping eld of views inserted in the calibration tool and the nal output after
calibration
a Right view with corresponding point
b Left view with corresponding point
c Two views are warped on the ground plane

Three-dimensional observation extraction module: It uses
the available camera calibration information to estimate the
accurate position of targets in the scene. Since the camera
calibration is based on homographies, an estimate for the
position (xw , yw) of a target in the world coordinates can be
directly determined from the centre of each blob. Each
observation is also associated with a reliability matrix R,
depending on the camera geometry and its position at the
camera plane. This matrix is calculated using the calibration
information [24]
R(xw , yw ) J (xc , yc )LJ (xc , yc ) T
(1)
where L is the measurement covariance at location (xc , yc) on
the camera plane, which is assumed to be a xed diagonal
matrix and J is the Jacobian matrix of the partial derivatives
of the mapping functions between the camera and the
world coordinate systems. Supposing that gx and gy are the
two mapping functions with gx (xc , yc ) xw and
gy (xc , yc ) yw , then the Jacobian matrix is dened as
2 3
@gx (xc , yc ) @gx (xc , yc )
6 7
6 @xc @yc 7 run by the SDF server, require synchronised capture of
J (xc , yc ) 6 7
4 @gy (xc , yc ) @gy (xc , yc ) 5
@xc @yc
The nal output of each ATU is a small set of parameters
(ground coordinates, classication, reliability), which is
transmitted to the SDF server through wired or wireless
transmission. If the foreground map fusion technique is
used, a greyscale image is provided at each polling cycle,
indicating the probability for each pixel to belong to the
foreground.
3 Network communications
The TRAVIS system is based on client server network
model where each ATU acts as a client to the SDF
listening server. The clients are connected to the server via
a wired connection or a wireless point-to-point or point-to-
multipoint wi/wimax connection. The ATUs are remotely
controlled from the SDF server through a signalling
channel that enables the SDF server user to start/stop
capture of frames, change operational mode, capture cycle
and other parameters. The signalling channel has been
implemented in order to separate data transmission of the
ATUs from control signals sent by SDF.
Data fusion and multiple hypotheses tracking algorithms,
frames of the scene using a constant sampling period. To
full this requirement, the network time protocol (NTP) is

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used in order to synchronise system clocks of each computer
in the TRAVIS network with reference to servers system
clock. For this conguration, the SDF server was set as
stratum 1 clock level in the NTP hierarchy, whereas every
ATU set at stratum 2 clock level.
Even with synchronised system clocks, a capture command
from the server will not arrive at every ATU on the same
moment of time because of network latency, computer
process delays and so on, which makes the coinstantaneous
frame grabbing from all ATUs with millisecond accuracy
impossible. For this reason, a synchronised capture
procedure is used, which was rst proposed in Litos et al.
[25]. According to this algorithm, after the synchronisation
of the system clocks, the SDF server sends to each ATU a
specic timestamp, indicating the time in the future when
the ATUs will start capturing frames as well as the value of
the (constant) frame sampling period.
3.1 Handshake procedure
After installation, all ATUs in the TRAVIS network are set
in standby mode. At this phase, each ATU is listening in a
user datagram protocol (UDP) port, dened during the
installation procedure, for command by the server. When
SDF server user clicks the start capturing button the
handshake procedure starts and a command is sent through
the signalling channel notifying the ATUs for SDF s IP
address and port number. The next step is for ATUs to
request TCP connection from the listening SDF server.
After all connections have been established and the
meeting time has been reached, the system enters normal
operation. In the normal operation phase, SDF and ATU
software maintain timers to control frame capture and
synchronisation.
This handshake scheme simplies both rst installation
and re-conguration of the nodes of TRAVIS network, since
The SDF or ATU IP addresses are not a-priori required.
Only the UDP port number where ATUs listen needs to
be known a-priori.
The SDF creates a list of the connected ATUs and waits
for their data.
3.2 Synchronisation maintenance
During normal operation, the ATUs calculate the timestamp
for capturing every next frame in order to keep being
synchronised to each other. After capturing the frame, image
processing techniques, as presented at previous section, are
applied to the captured frame, observations are extracted and
nally a packet is sent to SDF. On the other side, the server
receives one packet from every ATU, checks the timestamps
to certify that frames are synchronised and determines that
data are ready to be fused. If one of the ATUs does not
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complete frame processing within the available time cycle
(abnormal function), the time window for sending data is lost
and the data will arrive at the SDF server with delay. In this
case, this packet is discarded from the server, while the ATU
will wait for the next valid window to capture a new frame
and thus re-synchronise with the rest.
3.3 Secondary video streaming system
As a secondary backup system, the ATUs support on demand
media streaming directly to the control centre, where SDF
server is installed, in order to assist operators when an
accident or other abnormal situation is reported.
Depending on the available bandwidth, this secondary
backup system is able to stream compressed video or just a
number of compressed images. The application installed at
the control centre may render this input as Motion JPEG,
MPEG4 or any other available format and present it in a
new window. This service allows the operator to select the
specic ATU, watch the scene and validate the alarm.
4 SDF server
The SDF server collects information from all ATUs using a
constant polling cycle, produces fused estimates of the
position and velocity of each moving target and tracks these
targets using a multi-target tracking algorithm. It also
produces a synthetic ground situation display, collects
statistical information about the moving targets and provides
alerts when specic situations (e.g. accidents) are detected.
4.1 Data fusion
A target present simultaneously in the eld of view of
multiple cameras will result in multiple observations
because of the fact that the blob centres of the same object
in two different cameras correspond to close but different
3-D points. The system supports two different techniques
for grouping together all the observations that correspond
to the same target. The rst technique is the grid-based
fusion, which uses a grid to separate the overlap area in
cells. Optimal values for the cell size are determined
considering the application requirements (e.g. car size).
Observations belonging to the same cell or to neighbouring
cells are grouped together to a single fused observation [14].
The second technique is called foreground map fusion. In
this technique, as mentioned in Section 2, each ATU
provides the SDF server with one greyscale image per
polling cycle, indicating the probability for each pixel to
belong to the foreground. The SDF server fuses these maps
together by warping them to the ground plane and
multiplying them [26]. The fused observations are then
generated from these fused maps using connected
component analysis and classication information is
computed as in the ATUs blob classication module.
Although this technique has increased computational
and network bandwidth requirements, when compared to
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grid-based fusion, it can very robustly resolve occlusions
between multiple views and provide more accurate results
[14, 15],
4.2 Multiple target tracking
The tracking unit is based on the multiple hypothesis
tracking (MHT) algorithm, which starts tentative tracks on
all observations and uses subsequent data to determine
which of these newly initiated tracks are valid. Specically,
MHT [27] is a deferred decision logic algorithm in which
alternative data association hypotheses are formed whenever
there are observation-to-track conict situations. Then,
rather than combining these hypotheses, the hypotheses are
propagated in anticipation that subsequent data will resolve
the uncertainty. Generally, hypotheses are collections of
compatible tracks. Tracks are dened to be incompatible if
they share one or more common observation. MHT is a
statistical data association algorithm that integrates the
capabilities of (i) track initiation: automatic creation of new
tracks as new targets are detected; (ii) track termination:
automatic termination of a track when the target is no
longer visible for an extended period of time; (iii) track
continuation: continuation of a track over several frames in
the absence of observations; (iv) explicit modelling of
spurious observations; and (v) explicit modelling of
uniqueness constraints: an observation may only be
assigned to a single track at each polling cycle and vice versa.
Specically, the tracking unit was based on a fast
implementation of the MHT algorithm [22]. A 2-D
Kalman lter was used to track each target and additional
gating computations are performed to discard observation
track pairs. More specically, a gate region is dened
around each target at each frame and only observations
falling within this region are possible candidates to update
the specic track. The accurate modelling of the target
motion is very difcult, since a target may stop, move,
accelerate and so on. Since only position measurements are
available, a simple four-state (position and velocity along
each axes) CV (constant velocity) target motion model in
which the target acceleration is modelled as white noise
provides satisfactory results.
5 Experimental results
Two prototypes were installed, each focusing on a different
aspect of trafc monitoring (airports, tunnels at highways).
Extensive tests were made during pilot installations both at
Macedonia airport of Thessaloniki, Greece and at a tunnel
near Piraeus harbour of Athens, in order to optimise the
proposed system for each application. The maximum
vehicle speed that the system can detect depends on the
installation, while the system can cope well with small
velocities. Parameters that affect the maximum speed
limitation are the area of coverage and the frame rate of the
system. For example, a system congured to run at 2 f/s
and cover road distance of 40 m can estimate target
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velocities up to 144 km/h. In the following subsections, the
two prototype installations are discussed.
5.1 Airport prototype system
The rst prototype system concerns the trafc control of
aircraft parking areas (APRON). The system calculates the
position, velocity and direction of the targets and classies
them according to their type (car, man, long vehicle etc.).
Alerts are displayed in case of potentially dangerous
situations, such as speeding. This application also provides
a graphical display of the ground situation at the APRON.
This information can be accessible by the respective person
responsible, even if they are situated in a distant area, with
no direct eye-contact to the APRON. The prototype
system installed at Macedonia airport of Thessaloniki
consists of three cameras, which were installed at the fourth
oor of the control tower, mounted at the balcony ledge.
The cameras cover a great percentage of the APRON area
(approximately 25 000 m2), while focusing in parking place
number 4 of the airport APRON. The two ATUs (one
ATU is connected with two cameras) and the SDF server
were placed in the APRON control room of the tower and
are interconnected through an Ethernet network. Fig. 2
presents the views from two of the cameras installed at
Thessaloniki airport and the corresponding foreground
maps using the non-parametric modelling method.
Table 1 presents the execution times per frame of the basic
modules of the system for the airport application and the
percentage of time spent at each procedure. All times have
been acquired using the non-parametric modelling method
and the map fusion mode. The execution times are in the
range of milliseconds, which shows that the proposed
solution is suitable for real-time trafc surveillance at airports.
In order to analyse the results acquired by the system,
ground truth data had to be acquired. For the airport
prototype, tests have been conducted using cars equipped
with global positioning system (GPS) devices. The ground
truth data have been correlated with the system results and
then inserted into a database, along with relevant
environmental parameters. A test analysis tool has also been
implemented in order to calculate and display various
statistics that can be acquired by comparing the results of
the system with ground truth. Table 2 presents the average
position error for each camera as well as the average
position error of the system. Hence, the theoretical
obtainable accuracy of the system is approximately 3.69 m,
which compares favourably to the performance of surface-
movement radars (less than 7.5 m) according to the ICAO
specications [28]. Fig. 3 presents the trajectory of a
follow-up car (equipped with a GPS) moving on the yellow
line of the parking position 4 and the corresponding
trajectory estimated by the proposed system.
The position error distribution for the three cameras
installed at the airport application is shown in Fig. 4. The
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Figure 2 Detection of moving vehicles at Thessaloniki airport

a and b Views from two cameras at Thessaloniki airport
c and d Corresponding foreground maps

majority of the recorded position errors are between 0 and
5 m, while there is also a signicant percentage between 5
and 10 m. In total, more than 91% of the recorded
observations have been accurately detected (the GPS error
should also be considered).
Crucial statistics for this kind of evaluation are the false
positive and the false negative errors. False positive occurs
when the system observes a target, while in truth there is
none. On the other hand, false negative means systems
failure to detect a target when in truth there is one. False
negative error is considered of great importance since a high
value of this statistic means that the system is vulnerable to
errors that may have severe consequences, such as failing to
identify an emergency situation. Tests showed that the
Table 1 Execution times in airport application
Airport application
Modules Time, ms Percentage
system is robust enough to false negative errors, with a
probability of 4.5% (Table 3), whereas the false positive error
is approximately 15.3%, since the system is affected by
sudden lighting changes. The majority of errors are classied
as position errors, that is, detected targets with a position
deviation from the corresponding GPS record.
A basic drawback of all video-based surveillance systems is
the degradation of the systems performance under low
visibility conditions. In case of thin mist, where the
visibility of air trafc controller was limited, the system
performance was satisfactory, since a uniform background
was created facilitating the detection of targets. However in
case of thick fog, the system could not distinguish the
target from the background providing high false negative
errors. For this reason, the cameras should be installed as
close as possible to the surveyed area to reduce the
possibility of false negative errors under extremely low
Table 2 Average position errors

background extraction 43.56 49.09 Camera Average position error, m

data fusion 31.7 35.73 camera 1 3.65
tracker 0.22 0.25 camera 2 3.73
display 13.25 14.93 camera 3 3.69
total 88.73 100 total 3.69

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Figure 3 Comparison of a target trajectory to the ground
truth
The light grey line indicates the GPS signal, whereas the dark grey
line is the output of the proposed system
visibility. At night the system showed adequate capability to
detect targets, nevertheless slightly higher position errors are
produced due to the detection of aircrafts/vehicles lights.
5.2 Tunnel prototype system
Another prototype was applied for trafc control of tunnels at
highways. The focus of this application is on the collection of
trafc statistics, such as speed and loads per lane. It can also
identify potentially dangerous situations, such as objects
falling from a vehicle or trafc jams. These results can be
provided to trafc surveillance centres or they can be used to
accordingly activate local road signs and trafc lights. The
prototype was installed at a highway tunnel near Piraeus
Harbour, Athens, Greece. Taking into account existing
installation constraints (limitations from tunnel authorities,
slight left turn near the entrance etc.) two cameras were
Figure 4 Position error distribution for the airport application
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Table 3 Error types for airport application
Error type Percentage
false negative 4.5
false positive 15.3
position error 80.2
nally installed at the entrance of the tunnel, placed in a way
that the two elds of view partially overlap. The tunnel
coverage resulting for this pilot installation is about 35 m.
Each ATU consists of an embedded PC and a camera. The
embedded PCs were installed on top of the tunnel roof and
inside an IP-66 box, which is highly protective against
environmental conditions. A WiMAX interface was used to
connect the ATUs to the SDF server, which was installed in
a building about 1 km away (line of sight).
In Figs. 5a and b, two synchronised frames from the
different cameras are presented whereas Figs. 5c and d
present the corresponding thresholded foreground maps.
The SDF provides a visualisation window, which displays
the fused observations as well as the calculated trafc
statistics in real time. As in the case of airport prototype
system, the average execution times for each module of the
system are in the range of milliseconds (Table 4). However,
the execution times of the background extraction (non-
parametric modelling) as well as the data fusion (map
fusion mode) module are relatively high, since the observed
moving targets are close to the cameras and consequently
they cover larger regions on the camera frame.
For the tunnel prototype, the ground truth data were
collected by viewing image sequences through a specially
developed manual marking tool, which allows the user to
specify the correct position of the moving targets. The
ground truth data were correlated with the system results
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Figure 5 Detection of moving vehicles at Piraeus tunnel

a Frame from camera 1
b Frame from camera 2
c Mask from camera 1 frame
d Mask from camera 2 frame

and then inserted into the database. Table 5 presents the not affected by light changes or other environmental
average position error for each camera as well as the average conditions, the position error is higher than in the case of
systems position error, which is approximately 6.345 m. airport application. This is mainly due to two reasons: (i)
Although cameras are closer to targets and the system is long vehicles, for example, trucks cover a big part of the
cameras view creating high position errors and (ii) the
position of targets at the back of the scene cannot be
Table 4 Execution times for each module in tunnel estimated accurately because of the bad cameras perspective.
application Fig. 6 shows the trajectory of a vehicle, moving in the
supervised area of the tunnel, estimated by the manual
Tunnel application
marking tool (light grey dashed line) and the corresponding
Modules Time, ms Percentage
background extraction 61.78 35.86
data fusion 109.35 63.47
tracker 0.405 0.23
display 0.751 0.44
total 172.286 100

Table 5 Average position errors

Camera Average position error, m

camera 1 6.39 Figure 6 Comparison of a target trajectory to the ground
truth
camera 2 6.30 The light grey dashed line indicates the ground truth (manual
total 6.345 marking tool), whereas the dark grey solid line is the output of
the proposed system

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Figure 7 Position error distribution for the tunnel application
trajectory produced by the proposed system (dark grey solid
line). The deviation between two trajectories at the last
observation is due to the bad perspective of cameras.
Although this effect can be addressed by increasing the
number of cameras covering the monitoring area, high
accuracy is not such crucial in a tunnel application as in an
airport application.
The position error distribution for both cameras is shown in
Fig. 7. The majority of the recorded position errors are between
0 and 5 m, while there is also a signicant percentage between
5 and 10 m. This means that approximately 80% of the
recorded observations have been accurately detected (the
manual marking error should also be considered).
Finally, Table 6 contains statistics related to the error types
in the tunnel application. The majority of errors recorded are
position errors, 85.9%, while the system seems to be robust
enough to false negative errors, since it is unaffected by
weather conditions. However, false positive errors seem to
be relatively high because of the fact that long vehicles may
cover a big part of the cameras view, thus producing
erroneously multiple targets, which actually correspond only
to one moving vehicle.
6 Conclusions
A novel multi-camera video surveillance system focusing on
trafc monitoring applications was presented. The
Table 6 Error types for tunnel application
Error type Percentage
false negative 2.94
false positive 11.07
position error 85.9
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proposed solution is extensible, parameterised and it
supports various image processing and data fusion
techniques so as to be easily applicable to a broad eld of
trafc applications. The modular architecture of the
system, which is based on autonomous units (ATUs) that
work completely independently from each other, allows
the support of a large number of cameras without
increasing signicantly the computational requirements.
Test results from the two pilot applications for tunnel and
APRON trafc monitoring and surveillance show the
great potential of the proposed technology. Possible
future work includes the extension of the two pilot
applications by adding more autonomous trafc units and
the distribution of road/tunnel trafc information
through web to remote clients.
7 Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the General Secretariat of
Research and Technology Hellas under the InfoSoc
TRAVIS: Trafc VISual monitoring project and the EC
under the FP6 IST Network of Excellence: 3DTV-
Integrated Three-Dimensional Television Capture,
Transmission, and Display (contract FP6-511568). The
authors would like to thank MARAC Electronic S.A. for
the fruitful cooperation within TRAVIS project as well as
A. Smolic and HHI Berlin for supplying the video
sequences for the rst lab tests.
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