Building Meter Maid Dectector... Best OpenCV Method for Florescent Vest Recognition
<p>I work for a small startup downtown.  We don’t have any designated parking, just street parking with meters.  This can be quite an annoying situation and my coworkers and I end up getting a lot of tickets.  So I want to build a meter maid detector.  </p>

<p>I have a raspberry pi with a camera I’m using for the project.  I’m trying to use openCV to recognize the meter maid when he comes by and send an alert.  The maid meter, 99% of the time, wears a florescent yellow-green vest with reflective strips.  I have seen them a few times wearing just a blue shirt.  So my plan is to recognize that vest and maybe the blue shirt version as well.  </p>

<p>My early attempts have mainly involved converting the image to HSV and trying to see how many pixels are in the range similar to the vest.  I was however getting a lot of false positives especially near dawn and dusk.  I figure I should probably add in background subtraction so I don’t have to factor in the non-moving part of the scene.  I’m thinking there is probably a better solution than trying to compare pixels in a range.  I’ve ran into mean shift tracking and histogram matching, that sound promising, but I’m sure there’s many other methods.  I want to be able to detect him at different ranges and in different lighting conditions.  Any ideas what would work best for this type of object recognition?</p>