An Integrative Approach to Accurate Vehicle Logo Detection

Vehicle logo detection from images captured by surveillance cameras is an important step towards the vehicle recognition that is required for many applications in intelligent transportation systems and automatic surveillance. The task is challenging considering the small target of logos and the wide range of variability in shape, color, and illumination. A fast and reliable vehicle logo detection approach is proposed following visual attention mechanism from the human vision. Two prelogo detection steps, that is, vehicle region detection and a small RoI segmentation, rapidly focalize a small logo target. An enhanced Adaboost algorithm, together with two types of features of Haar and HOG, is proposed to detect vehicles. An RoI that covers logos is segmented based on our prior knowledge about the logos’ position relative to license plates, which can be accurately localized from frontal vehicle images. A two-stage cascade classier proceeds with the segmented RoI, using a hybrid of Gentle Adaboost and Support Vector Machine (SVM), resulting in precise logo positioning. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme. 1. Introduction With the development of traffic infrastructures and the automobile industry, intelligent transportation system (ITS) is becoming ever more significant. As an important part of ITS, automatic vehicle recognition (AVR) has been attracting a significant amount of attention in the recent years due to its commercial value and practical significance in road traffic monitoring and management. AVR is also pertinent to many intelligent surveillance applications [1–6]. For example, police often need to perform search for a specific vehicle from recorded traffic image database captured at toll stations or check points to assist in tracking suspects. In many situations, the conventional vehicle registration plate recognition techniques are insufficient to identify the vehicle. This is particularly relevant when license plate information is unreliable, for example, when the license plate is forged. To facilitate a reliable vehicle identification process, it is necessary to introduce additional criteria as complements to the number plate recognition systems. Vehicle logo is the most visually distinguishable mark for automobile brands, and has been considered as one of the important components in an AVR system. A vehicle logo can provide the identity of the vehicle manufacturer, which can be used for a number of different purposes involving vehicle verification, identification, and recognition. With logos