Mobi-Trick

MOBILE TRAFFIC CHECKER

Project Description

The focus of the project is outdoor mobile computer vision with all of its challenges. Mobile systems need to be compact and energy efficient and are frequently changing locations. Therefore they must be autonomous and perform processing locally. A number of challenges arise from these requirements for which the project aims to provide solutions: Being compact, there is not much space for a large number of sensors such as laser scanners, radar antennas and the like. The work in this project will focus on stereo vision but with two different types of cameras. Often a second camera is already available and stereo information increases detection accuracies. Each time the system moves it needs to adapt to the changing situation. This requires adaptive calibration and on-line learning. Mobile systems often work from batteries. In addition, there is not much space to include intricate cooling systems. Thus, the system must be designed to be very energy efficient. New approaches for dynamic power management will be explored in the project. To put the work into context, several applications from the area of traffic surveillance/toll enforcement will be implemented and tested in an application oriented setting. Current traffic enforcement solutions are either very large and costly (section control, toll enforcement) or do not offer much in terms of image processing (radar speed control). The technological output of Mobi Trick makes it possible to design mobile solutions for traffic monitoring, vehicle identification and classification, intelligent incident detection and observation of driver behavior. Mobile devices are also more efficient in enforcement. Their transient nature makes them less predictable. Mobile systems can also react more flexibly to changing road situations such as construction sites.

News & Data

FIT-IT Award 2010
Our project MOBI-Trick won the 3rd place at the FIT-IT Award 2010 in the Visual Computing Category! DAGM Publication
We have presented our work on On-line Multi-view Forests for Tracking at DAGM in Darmstadt. This perfectly fits into the heterogeneous setup that is planned within MobiTrick.ICPR Publication
We have presented our work on On-line Random Naive Bayes for Tracking on ICPR in Istanbul. It presents a leight-weight and adaptive learning approach, which makes it especially suitable for mobile devices.ECCV Publication Our work on Robust Multi-View Boosting with Priors has been accepted for presentation at ECCV in Heraklionon, Greece. It demonstrates multi-view learning in a semi-supervised multi-class setup.

FCam

The FCam sensor head has been developed by EFKON AG and is used during the MOBI-Trick project. It basically contains a processing board and one or two cameras and was intentially designed for the task of license-plate detection and recognition/readout. The version used in the MOBI-Trick project includes one infrared camera and one for visible light. Additionally it houses an infrared flashlight and can be powered with a 12V battery for portable useage.

Project Partners

Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology
ICG is the only Austrian academic group with the charter to address both Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, and is carefully nurturing a culture of Digital Visual Information Processing to resolve the artificial boundaries between computer graphics and computer vision. The research at ICG is focused on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Medical Computer Vision, Object Recognition, Object Reconstruction, Robotics, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.  Horst Bischof, Martin Godec, Markus Heber, Peter Holzer, Peter M. Roth, Sabine Sternig Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems, Klagenfurt University
The Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems of the University of Klagenfurt is engaged in the design, modeling, and analysis of networked and embedded systems of the future. Research and teaching areas consist of algorithms, protocols, architectures, signal processing, network theory, and their applications. The main emphasis is on research into wireless and mobile systems. Current projects are concerned with, for example, intelligent cameras, cooperation and self-organization in wireless networks as well as energy-efficient hardware components in mobile communications. Umair Ali Khan, Felix Pletzer, Markus Quaritsch,  Bernhard Rinner, Thomas Winkler Efkon AG
EFKON AG is a worldwide leading company in Intelligent Transportation Systems; Electronic Payment Applications; multi-application Central Clearing House; vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadside and roadside-to-vehicle communication based on active communication; disposes over all major Electronic Tolling Technologies such as Satellite, CEN 5,8GHz Microwave and ISO CALM Active bi-directional high speed Communication; provides Turn Key/End to End ITS-Intelligent Transportation, e-Payment, Traffic Management, Enforcement and Traffic Telematic Solutions. Marcus Hennecke, Arnold Maier