Development of highway vehicle detection using background subtraction and Haar cascade methods

Abstract

Vehicle recognition is a critical component of traffic analysis and the progress of advanced transportation systems, underscoring the importance of automated, real-time methods that reduce the need for manual observation. While the field has seen notable innovations in deep learning-centric detection technologies, many of these approaches require considerable computational strength and are not well-suited for real-time application in resource-constrained environments. In response to this limitation, the present study introduces a streamlined vehicle detection framework that combines background subtraction for motion-oriented foreground extraction with a Haar cascade classifier for object identification in traffic video sequences. The system is evaluated using real-world highway traffic recordings under different illumination conditions, including both day and night scenarios. The experiment's findings show that the system achieves an overall accuracy of 82.08%, with a precision of 85.33%, a recall of 66.67%, and an F1-score of 74.86%. The system also demonstrates consistent performance across different lighting conditions. These findings indicate a trade-off between detection accuracy and computational efficiency, where the proposed approach prioritizes practical deployment feasibility. Overall, the results suggest that classical computer vision techniques remain viable alternatives for real-time traffic monitoring in environments with limited computational resources.