Biologically-Inspired Long-Range Traffic Monitoring System with Basler ace USB 3.0 Camera

The number of automobiles around the world has increased tremendously during the past few decades, thanks to industrial revolution and advances in transport technology. As a result, the demand for an efficient traffic monitoring system has become inevitable for reliable traffic administration. In Singapore, the currently-adopted speed detection systems have several drawbacks. One such challenge is that the image taken by the camera, which is triggered by the speed detector, may contain multiple vehicles at the same time. This can cause incorrect issuance of speeding tickets, as there is no reliable way to pinpoint which vehicle was speeding.

Efforts to revolutionize traffic monitoring using computer-vision-based systems are limited by the fixed depth-of-field of the camera with short-range viewing ability. These systems perform vehicle tracking near the installed location, and hence they can only track and calculate vehicle speed within a small distance. A reliable long-distance tracking vision-based traffic system is the real need-of-the-hour for the current situation.

The Control and Simulation Research Group at National University of Singapore has developed a novel, affordable and yet reliable vision-based traffic monitoring system, which is known as ‘Raptor Vision’, to overcome the shortcomings of the current traffic monitoring systems. The system is inspired by the visual structure found in raptors, which have simultaneous near-field and far-field viewing capabilities. By making use of Basler cameras, the tracking range can be extended to 1km, which is a great improvement over current systems.