IMAGE BASED RECOGNITION OF DYNAMIC TRAFFIC SITUATIONS BY EVALUATING THE EXTERIOR SURROUNDING AND INTERIOR SPACE OF VEHICLES

Abstract. Today, cameras mounted in vehicles are used to observe the driver as well as the objects around a vehicle. In this article, an outline of a concept for image based recognition of dynamic traffic situations is shown. A dynamic traffic situation will be described by road users and their intentions. Images will be taken by a vehicle fleet and aggregated on a server. On these images, new strategies for machine learning will be applied iteratively when new data has arrived on the server. The results of the learning process will be models describing the traffic situation and will be transmitted back to the recording vehicles. The recognition will be performed as a standalone function in the vehicles and will use the received models. It can be expected, that this method can make the detection and classification of objects around the vehicles more reliable. In addition, the prediction of their actions for the next seconds should be possible. As one example how this concept is used, a method to recognize the illumination situation of a traffic scene is described. This allows to handle different appearances of objects depending on the illumination of the scene. Different illumination classes will be defined to distinguish different illumination situations. Intensity based features are extracted from the images and used by a classifier to assign an image to an illumination class. This method is being tested for a real data set of daytime and nighttime images. It can be shown, that the illumination class can be classified correctly for more than 80% of the images.