Automatic Real-Time River Traffic Monitoring Based on Artificial Vision Techniques

Artificial vision techniques derived from computer vision and autonomous robotic systems have been successfully employed for river traffic monitoring and management. For this purpose, ARGOS and HYDRA systems have been developed by Achimedes Logica in collaboration with Sapienza University of Rome under the EU initiatives URBAN and MOBILIS for the monitoring of the boat traffic in Venice on the Gran Canal and the harbour area. These advanced systems provide an efficient automatic traffic monitoring to guarantee navigation safety and regular flow while producing and distributing information about the traffic. The systems are based on the processing of digital images that are gathered by survey cell stations distributed throughout the supervised area providing a visual platform on which the system displays recent and live traffic conditions in a synthetic way similar to radar view. ARGOS and HYDRA systems are programmed to automatically recognize and notice situations of great interest in whatever sea or land-targeted security applications including environmental, perimeter, and security control. This article describes the wide spectrum of applications of these two systems, that is, monitoring traffic and automatically tracking position, speed and direction of all vehicles.