Current traffic research is mostly based on data from fixed-installed sensors like induction loops, bridge sensors, and cameras. Thereby, the traffic flow on main roads can partially be acquired, while data from the major part of the entire road network are not available. Today's optical sensor systems on satellites provide large-area images with 1-m resolution and better, which can deliver complement information to traditional acquired data. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic vehicle detection from optical satellite images. Therefore, hypotheses for single vehicles are generated using adaptive boosting in combination with Haar-like features. Additionally, vehicle queues are detected using a line extraction technique since grouped vehicles are merged to either dark or bright ribbons. Utilizing robust parameter estimation, single vehicles are determined within those vehicle queues. The combination of implicit modeling and the use of a priori knowledge of typical vehicle constellation leads to an enhanced overall completeness compared to approaches which are only based on statistical classification techniques. Thus, a detection rate of over 80% is possible with very high reliability. Furthermore, an approach for movement estimation of the detected vehicle is described, which allows the distinction of moving and stationary traffic. Thus, even an estimate for vehicles' speed is possible, which gives additional information about the traffic condition at image acquisition time.

Given that ground stationary infrastructures for traffic monitoring are barely able to handle everyday traffic volumes, there is a risk that they could fail altogether in situations arising from mass events or disasters. In this work, we present an alternative approach for traffic monitoring during disaster and mass events, which is based on an airborne optical sensor system. With this system, optical image sequences are automatically examined on board an aircraft to estimate road traffic information, such as vehicle positions, velocities and driving directions. The traffic information, estimated in real time on board, is immediately downlinked to a ground station. The airborne sensor system consists of a three-head camera system, a real-time-capable GPS/INS unit, five industrial PCs and a downlink unit. The processing chain for automatic extraction of traffic information contains modules for the synchronization of image and navigation data streams, orthorectification and vehicle detection and tracking modules. The vehicle detector is based on a combination of AdaBoost and support vector machine classifiers. Vehicle tracking relies on shape-based matching operators. The processing chain is evaluated on a large number of image sequences recorded during several campaigns, and the data quality is compared to that obtained from induction loops. In summary, we can conclude that the achieved overall quality of the traffic data extracted by the airborne system is in the range of 68% and 81%. Thus, it is comparable to data obtained from stationary ground sensor networks.

Keywords: LIDAR, Point Cloud, Features, Geometric Feature Design, Multiscale, Probability Histogram Due to ever more efficient and accurate laser scanning technologies, the analysis of 3D point clouds has become an important task in modern photogrammetry and remote sensing. To exploit the full potential of such data for structural analysis and object detection, reliable geometric features are of crucial importance. Since multiscale approaches have proved very successful for image-based applications, efforts are currently made to apply similar approaches on 3D point clouds. In this paper we analyse common geometric covariance features, pinpointing some severe limitations regarding their performance on varying scales. Instead, we propose a different feature type based on shape distributions known from object recognition. These novel features show a very reliable performance on a wide scale range and their results in classification outnumber covariance features in all tested cases.