Title: Traffic meteorological visibility estimation based on homogenous area extraction

Authors: Hongjun Song; Yuanyuan Gao; Yangzhou Chen

Addresses: College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang A&F University, Hangzhou 311300, China ' College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang A&F University, Hangzhou 311300, China ' Center for Autonomous Technology and Intelligent Control, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China

Abstract: A novel technique for estimating traffic visibility based on homogenous area extraction is presented in this paper. Focusing on the problem of detecting daytime fog and estimating visibility, this proposed algorithm adopts a measure defined by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) as the distance beyond which a black object of an appropriate dimension is perceived with a contrast of less than 5%. The key step for the algorithm is homogenous area extraction including sky and road selection from the top to the bottom of traffic image. Traffic meteorological visibility will be known as long as the inflection point's location of this area is found. Camera parameter calibration should be done by vanishing points calculation based on painted lines detection. At last, calibration results, inflection point and traffic meteorological visibility for three different traffic scenes will be given. Comparison with real data obtained manually verifies the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Keywords: traffic meteorological visibility; homogenous area extraction; fog; weather conditions; inflection point; camera calibration; vanishing point; traffic visibility; limited visibility.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2013.055565

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2013 Vol.48 No.1, pp.36 - 48

Published online: 31 Jul 2013 *

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