SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Markus Zarbock

Publications and source records attributed to Markus Zarbock.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

TAU-R1: Visual Language Model for Traffic Anomaly Understanding

Traffic Anomaly Understanding (TAU) is important for traffic safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in video understanding. However, progress on TAU remains limited due to the lack of benchmarks and task-specific methodologies. To address this limitation, we introduce Roundabout-TAU, a dataset constructed from real-world roundabout videos collected in collaboration with the City of Carmel, Indiana. The dataset contains 342 clips and is annotated with more than 2,000 question-answer pairs covering multiple aspects of traffic anomaly understanding. Building on this benchmark, we propose TAU-R1, a two-layer vision-language framework for TAU. The first layer is a lightweight anomaly classifier that performs coarse anomaly categorisation, while the second layer is a larger anomaly reasoner that generates detailed event summaries. To improve task-specific reasoning, we introduce a two-stage training strategy consisting of decomposed-QA-enhanced supervised fine-tuning followed by TAU-GRPO, a GRPO-based post-training method with TAU-specific reward functions. Experimental results show that TAU-R1 achieves strong performance on both anomaly classification and reasoning tasks while maintaining deployment efficiency. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/siri-rouser/TAU-R1

cs.CV

Edge Assisted Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking Framework for Real-Time and Scalable Deployment

Cameras are a core sensing modality in modern intelligent transportation systems (ITS), providing rich visual information on road-user activities. Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking (MCVT) uses this data to reconstruct vehicle trajectories across camera networks, supporting applications such as traffic flow prediction and optimisation. However, most existing MCVT studies emphasise tracking accuracy while paying limited attention to real-time performance and scalability, both essential for real-world and city-scale deployment. To address this gap, we propose Edge-Assisted, Scalable and Efficient MCVT (EASE-MCVT), a distributed edge--server framework designed for real-time throughput and scalable operation. On the edge side, each camera stream is processed through object detection, single-camera tracking, geo-mapping and feature extraction, while only lightweight metadata, including vehicle locations and appearance features, is sent to the central server for cross-camera association. To improve both tracking accuracy and system efficiency, EASE-MCVT is optimised from algorithmic and system perspectives. Algorithmically, it introduces a dynamic workload scheme for tracklet-level feature extraction, a server-side re-match module to reconnect fragmented tracklets, and a self-supervised camera link model that learns spatio-temporal constraints to accelerate and stabilise cross-camera association. Systemically, it integrates production-oriented data engineering components to standardise deployment and data exchange for large-scale operation. To the best of our knowledge, EASE-MCVT is the first MCVT framework explicitly designed to address both real-time performance and scalability in a distributed edge--server setting. Experiments on the RoundaboutHD and CityFlow datasets demonstrate real-time throughput with competitive tracking accuracy, paving the way for city-wide real-time traffic management.

cs.CV

RoundaboutHD: High-Resolution Real-World Urban Environment Benchmark for Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking

The multi-camera vehicle tracking (MCVT) framework holds significant potential for smart city applications, including anomaly detection, traffic density estimation, and suspect vehicle tracking. However, current publicly available datasets exhibit limitations, such as overly simplistic scenarios, low-resolution footage, and insufficiently diverse conditions, creating a considerable gap between academic research and real-world scenario. To fill this gap, we introduce RoundaboutHD, a comprehensive, high-resolution multi-camera vehicle tracking benchmark dataset specifically designed to represent real-world roundabout scenarios. RoundaboutHD provides a total of 40 minutes of labelled video footage captured by four non-overlapping, high-resolution (4K resolution, 15 fps) cameras. In total, 512 unique vehicle identities are annotated across different camera views, offering rich cross-camera association data. RoundaboutHD offers temporal consistency video footage and enhanced challenges, including increased occlusions and nonlinear movement inside the roundabout. In addition to the full MCVT dataset, several subsets are also available for object detection, single camera tracking, and image-based vehicle re-identification (ReID) tasks. Vehicle model information and camera modelling/ geometry information are also included to support further analysis. We provide baseline results for vehicle detection, single-camera tracking, image-based vehicle re-identification, and multi-camera tracking. The dataset and the evaluation code are publicly available at: https://github.com/siri-rouser/RoundaboutHD.git

cs.CV