Vehicle occupancy detection camera position optimization using design of experiments and standard image references

Camera positioning and orientation is important to applications in domains such as transportation since the objects to be imaged vary greatly in shape and size. In a typical transportation application that requires capturing still images, inductive loops buried in the ground or laser trigger sensors are used when a vehicle reaches the image capture zone to trigger the image capture system. The camera in such a system is in a fixed position pointed at the roadway and at a fixed orientation. Thus the problem is to determine the optimal location and orientation of the camera when capturing images from a wide variety of vehicles. Methods from Design for Six Sigma, including identifying important parameters and noise sources and performing systematically designed experiments (DOE) can be used to determine an effective set of parameter settings for the camera position and orientation under these conditions. In the transportation application of high occupancy vehicle lane enforcement, the number of passengers in the vehicle is to be counted. Past work has described front seat vehicle occupant counting using a camera mounted on an overhead gantry looking through the front windshield in order to capture images of vehicle occupants. However, viewing rear seat passengers is more problematic due to obstructions including the vehicle body frame structures and seats. One approach is to view the rear seats through the side window. In this situation the problem of optimally positioning and orienting the camera to adequately capture the rear seats through the side window can be addressed through a designed experiment. In any automated traffic enforcement system it is necessary for humans to be able to review any automatically captured digital imagery in order to verify detected infractions. Thus for defining an output to be optimized for the designed experiment, a human defined standard image reference (SIR) was used to quantify the quality of the line-of-sight to the rear seats of the vehicle. The DOE-SIR method was exercised for determining the optimal camera position and orientation for viewing vehicle rear seats over a variety of vehicle types. The resulting camera geometry was used on public roadway image capture resulting in over 95% acceptable rear seat images for human viewing.