Smart Camera for Traffic Applications

This paper presents a compact intelligent camera with traffic surveillance and enforcement as a primary application field. The camera's unique features are 1/ embedded object detection of user-defined objects and 2/ excellent image quality achieved by a custom HDR image acquisition and tone mapping. Intelligent cameras are essential parts of equipment in production, control, security and primarily traffic surveillance and enforcement. In many applications, they serve as a versatile source of images processed elsewhere, and reduction of required processing and communication achieved by embedded (pre)processing within the intelligent camera is always welcome. The key blocks of the camera are implemented in FPGA to reduce the CPU load and thus the power requirements. The control software uses an embedded CPU running Linux. The camera is designed to provide key images that are interesting from the application point of view and to provide metadata. On the camera prototype, we observed total power consumption of 8 W and object detection accuracy > 99%. Application designers can extensively modify the camera design and functionality to harness various applications, such as traffic surveillance and enforcement, quality control, etc.