Traffic Flow Monitoring with Thermal Camera: Vehicle Detection, Tracking, and Counting

Project Description

This project aims to detect various types of vehicles using thermal cameras installed as surveillance sensors in streets. It employs a tracking-by-detection scheme to track the detected objects and subsequently counts the number of unique objects passing through each user-defined polygon.

Object Detection

For object detection, we utilized YOLO-NAS fine-tuned on the aauRainSnow dataset ([Download Link][License Link]). Codes for generating the appropriate YOLO annotations from the dataset and training the object detector are included. Additionally, the trained weights are also provided.

Multi-Object Tracking

For multi-object tracking, we utilize SORT (Simple, Online, and Real-time Tracking of multiple objects), which has demonstrated promising results in this task.

How to Use

Requirements

For working with images and videos install: OpenCV For using and training object detector install these two packages: PyTorch Super Gradients For tracking install: SORT Python

Training/Fine-tuning the object detector

The link to download trained model weights is located in checkpoint-object-detection/checkpoint_link.txt. However, if you want to train it yourself or train with a new set of hyperparameters, follow these instructions:

1. Download the original aauRainSnow dataset by referring to the instructions in dataset/data-link.txt.
2. Execute convert_coco_to_yolov7_annotation.py to create the appropriate YOLO annotation format from the original dataset.
3. Finally, run the code in finetuning_YOLO_NAS_thermal_camera.ipynb to train the object detector.

Configuration files and inputs videos

For tracking and unique object counting in specific regions, you can use the provided configuration file named config_files. Configuration files such as config-co-*.json are designed for both tracking and counting tasks, while files like config-tr-*.json are solely for tracking and do not involve counting.

Place input videos corresponding to the configuration files in the inputs folder, following the instructions outlined in inputs/input-data.txt.

Feel free to create similar configuration files with different hyperparameters for object detection, tracking, input videos, and regions of interest to customize the counting of unique objects that pass through them.

Executing the Code

1. Put the path of the configuration file that you want to use in config_file_path.json.

2. Run the code with python run.py.

Demo

![Watch the demo]