Vision Technologies with Applications in Traffic Surveillance Systems: A Holistic Survey

Traffic Surveillance Systems (TSS) have become increasingly crucial in modern intelligent transportation systems, with vision technologies playing a central role for scene perception and understanding. While existing surveys typically focus on isolated aspects of TSS, a comprehensive analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, particularly considering emerging technologies, remains lacking. This paper presents a systematic review of vision technologies in TSS, examining both low-level perception tasks (object detection, classification, and tracking) and high-level perception tasks (parameter estimation, anomaly detection, and behavior understanding). Specifically, we first provide a detailed methodological categorization and comprehensive performance evaluation for each task. Our investigation reveals five fundamental limitations in current TSS: perceptual data degradation in complex scenarios, data-driven learning constraints, semantic understanding gaps, sensing coverage limitations and computational resource demands. To address these challenges, we systematically analyze five categories of current approaches and potential trends: advanced perception enhancement, efficient learning paradigms, knowledge-enhanced understanding, cooperative sensing frameworks and efficient computing frameworks, critically assessing their real-world applicability. Furthermore, we evaluate the transformative potential of foundation models in TSS, which exhibit remarkable zero-shot learning abilities, strong generalization, and sophisticated reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. This review provides a unified analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, systematically analyzes current limitations and solutions, and presents a structured roadmap for integrating emerging technologies, particularly foundation models, to enhance TSS capabilities.