Spotted hyena optimizer with deep learning enabled vehicle counting and classification model for intelligent transportation systems

Traffic surveillance systems are utilized to collect and monitor the traffic condition data of the road networks. This data plays a crucial role in a variety of applications of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). In traffic surveillance, it is challenging to achieve accurate vehicle detection and count the vehicles from traffic videos. The most notable difficulties include real-time system operations for precise classification, identification of the vehicles' location in traffic flows and functioning around total occlusions that hamper the vehicle tracking process. Conventional video-related vehicle detection techniques such as optical flow, background subtraction and frame difference have certain limitations in terms of efficiency or accuracy. Therefore, the current study proposes to design the spotted hyena optimizer with deep learning-enabled vehicle counting and classification (SHODL-VCC) model for the ITSs. The aim of the proposed SHODL-VCC technique lies in accurate counting and classification of the vehicles in traffic surveillance. To achieve this, the proposed SHODL-VCC technique follows a two-stage process that includes vehicle detection and vehicle classification. Primarily, the presented SHODL-VCC technique employs the RetinaNet object detector to identify the vehicles. Next, the detected vehicles are classified into different class labels using the deep wavelet auto-encoder model. To enhance the vehicle detection performance, the spotted hyena optimizer algorithm is exploited as a hyperparameter optimizer, which considerably enhances the vehicle detection rate. The proposed SHODL-VCC technique was experimentally validated using different databases. The comparative outcomes demonstrate the promising vehicle classification performance of the SHODL-VCC technique in comparison with recent deep learning approaches.