Anomaly Detection in Vehicle Traffic with Image Processing and Machine Learning

Anomaly detection is an important part of an Intelligent Transportation System. In this study, image processing and machine learning techniques are used to detect anomalies in vehicle movements. These anomalies include standing and traveling in reverse direction. Images are captured using CCTV cameras from front and rear side of the vehicle. This capability makes the results robust to the variations in operational and environmental conditions. Multiple consecutive frames are acquired for motion detection. Features such as edges and license plate corner locations are extracted for tracking purposes. Direction of the traffic flow is obtained from the trained classifier. K-nearest neighbor is chosen as the classifier model. The proposed method is evaluated on a public highway and promising detection results are achieved.