Real-Time Vehicle Make and Model Recognition System

Abstract

A Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR) system can provide great value in terms of vehicle monitoring and identification based on vehicle appearance in addition to the vehicles’ attached license plate typical recognition. A real-time VMMR system is an important component of many applications such as automatic vehicle surveillance, traffic management, driver assistance systems, traffic behavior analysis, and traffic monitoring, etc. A VMMR system has a unique set of challenges and issues. Few of the challenges are image acquisition, variations in illuminations and weather, occlusions, shadows, reflections, large variety of vehicles, inter-class and intra-class similarities, addition/deletion of vehicles’ models over time, etc. In this work, we present a unique and robust real-time VMMR system which can handle the challenges described above and recognize vehicles with high accuracy. We extract image features from vehicle images and create feature vectors to represent the dataset. We use two classification algorithms, Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), in our work. We use a realistic dataset to test and evaluate the proposed VMMR system. The vehicles’ images in the dataset reflect real-world situations. The proposed VMMR system recognizes vehicles on the basis of make, model, and generation (manufacturing years) while the existing VMMR systems can only identify the make and model. Comparison with existing VMMR research demonstrates superior performance of the proposed system in terms of recognition accuracy and processing speed.