Traffic-Oriented Three-Dimensional Vehicle Reconstruction Using Fixed Roadside Monocular Camera Sensors

Fixed roadside monocular cameras are widely used as low-cost sensing devices in intelligent transportation systems; however, extracting reliable three-dimensional (3D) information from such sensors remains challenging due to limited baselines, long observation distances, and moving vehicles. This paper presents a traffic-oriented 3D vehicle reconstruction framework based on monocular image sequences captured by fixed roadside camera sensors. Semantic and non-semantic vehicle feature points are jointly exploited to balance structural consistency and surface completeness, and a feature-map-consistency-based optimization strategy is introduced to refine feature point localization and reduce reprojection errors. In addition, an optimized incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline incorporating traffic-aware initialization, keyframe selection, and local bundle adjustment is developed to improve reconstruction efficiency. Experiments on real-world traffic surveillance videos show that the proposed method reduces the mean reprojection error by 13.6% and shortens reconstruction time by 43.9% compared with widely used incremental SfM systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Sensors
Published
2026-02-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s26041324
Primary Topic
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Traffic-Oriented Three-Dimensional Vehicle Reconstruction Using Fixed Roadside Monocular Camera Sensors

Youqi Zhang, Chu Zhang, Liangbin Li, Xianhua Cai
Sensors
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
article

Traffic-Oriented Three-Dimensional Vehicle Reconstruction Using Fixed Roadside Monocular Camera Sensors

Youqi Zhang, Chu Zhang, Liangbin Li, Xianhua Cai
article en

Abstract

Fixed roadside monocular cameras are widely used as low-cost sensing devices in intelligent transportation systems; however, extracting reliable three-dimensional (3D) information from such sensors remains challenging due to limited baselines, long observation distances, and moving vehicles. This paper presents a traffic-oriented 3D vehicle reconstruction framework based on monocular image sequences captured by fixed roadside camera sensors. Semantic and non-semantic vehicle feature points are jointly exploited to balance structural consistency and surface completeness, and a feature-map-consistency-based optimization strategy is introduced to refine feature point localization and reduce reprojection errors. In addition, an optimized incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline incorporating traffic-aware initialization, keyframe selection, and local bundle adjustment is developed to improve reconstruction efficiency. Experiments on real-world traffic surveillance videos show that the proposed method reduces the mean reprojection error by 13.6% and shortens reconstruction time by 43.9% compared with widely used incremental SfM systems.

SensorsVol. 26(4)
Southeast University (CN)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 53%
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
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