Tracking Hit-and-Run Vehicle with Sparse Video Surveillance Cameras and Mobile Taxicabs

Due to the sparse distribution of road video surveillance cameras, precise trajectory tracking for hit-and-run vehicles remains a challenging task. Previous research on vehicle trajectory recovery mostly focuses on recovering trajectory with low-sampling-rate GPS coordinates by retrieving road traffic flow patterns from collected GPS information. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them considered using on-road taxicabs as mobile video surveillance cameras as well as the time-varying characteristics of vehicle traveling and road traffic flow patterns, therefore not suitable for recovering trajectories of hit-and-run vehicles. With this insight, we model the travel time-cost of a road segment during various time periods precisely with LNDs (Logarithmic Normal Distributions), then use LSNDs (Log Skew Normal Distributions) to approximate the time-cost of an urban trip during various time periods. We propose a novel approach to calculate possible location and time distribution of the hit-and-run vehicle in parallel, select the optimal taxicab to verify the distribution by uploading and checking video clips of this taxicab, finally refine the restoring trajectory in a parallel and recursive manner. We evaluate our solution on real-world taxicab and road surveillance system datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms alternative solutions in terms of accuracy ratio of vehicle tracking.