A real-time optical airborne road traffic monitoring system

In the last years, the Remote Sensing Technology Institute of the German Aerospace Center has been developing a real-time airborne monitoring system which can be used during natural disasters, mass events and huge traffic jams. This system consists of a cost-effective optical camera system, onboard computers for real-time processing and a datalink for transmitting the traffic information and aerial images to the ground station. The traffic information is automatically extracted from the images by detecting the cars and tracking them within a few frames. Results are the position and the speed of each cars, which are written into a database on the ground. In this paper we give a description of the overall system with focus on the automatic vehicle detection