FPGA and ASIC implementation of the algorithm for traffic monitoring in urban areas

This paper describes the idea and the implementation of the image detection algorithm, that can be used in integrated sensor networks for environment and traffic monitoring in urban areas. The algorithm is dedicated to the extraction of moving vehicles from real-time camera images for the evaluation of traffic parameters, such as the number of vehicles, their direction of movement and their approximate speed. The authors, apart from the careful selection of particular steps of the algorithm towards hardware implementation, also proposed novel improvements, resulting in increasing the robustness and the efficiency. A single, stationary, monochrome camera is used, simple shadow and highlight elimination is performed. The occlusions are not taken into account, due to placing the camera at a location high above the road. The algorithm is designed and implemented in pipelined hardware, therefore high frame-rate efficiency has been achieved. The algorithm has been implemented and tested in FPGA and ASIC.