A Public Video Dataset for Road Transportation Applications

Abstract

Video data and the tools for automated analysis have a great potential to be used in road traffic research, particularly road safety. In this project a video dataset is built and made public so that researchers can evaluate their algorithms on it. The dataset focuses on the traffic research applications (data from real research projects) and provides recordings of the traffic scenes, meta-data, camera calibration, ground truth, protocols for comparing algorithms and software tools and libraries for reading/presenting the data. To the authors’ knowledge, this public dataset is the first of its kind. With the proposed dataset, researchers get access to a large variety of recordings representing different traffic, weather and lighting conditions to evaluate and compare different tools and applications. As a consequence, discussions between computer vision and transportation researchers are expected to increase, contributing to more collaborations and better tools, more accurate and user-friendly, to obtain automatically rich traffic data from video.