Implementation of a FPGA-Based Feature Detection and Networking System for Real-time Traffic Monitoring

With the growing demand of real-time traffic monitoring nowadays, software-based image processing can hardly meet the real-time data processing requirement due to the serial data processing nature. In this paper, the implementation of a hardware-based feature detection and networking system prototype for real-time traffic monitoring as well as data transmission is presented. The hardware architecture of the proposed system is mainly composed of three parts: data collection, feature detection, and data transmission. Overall, the presented prototype can tolerate a high data rate of about 60 frames per second. By integrating the feature detection and data transmission functions, the presented system can be further developed for various VANET application scenarios to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. For example, detection of vehicles that violate traffic rules, parking enforcement, etc.