In this paper, we develop an image-based tracking algorithm of multiple vehicles performing effective detection and tracking of moving objects under adverse environmental conditions. In particular, we employ low cost commercial off-the-shelf IR or CCD image sensor for generating continuous images of multiple moving vehicles. The motion in image sequences is first detected by adaptive background estimation and then tracked by Kalman filtering with the attribute information being updated by data association. Upon applying a modified Retinex procedure as preprocessing to reduce the illumination effects, we proceed with a two-step tracking algorithm. The first step achieves blob grouping and then judicially selects the true targets for tracking using data association through information registration. In the second stage, all blobs detected go through a validation for screening as well as for occlusion reasoning, and those found pertinent to the real object survive to become the 'Object' state for stable tracking. The results of representative tests confirm its effectiveness in vehicle tracking under both daylight and nighttime conditions while resolving occlusions.

This paper is a brief survey of mobile applications of meteor burst communications (MBC). Though the capacity of MBC systems is generally not large, this unique long distance communication method has at least two selling points when applied to mobiles. First of all, it is cheap. Secondly, it can easily offer nationwide seamless service. Thus, since the late 1980s, mobile MBC systems have been attracting interests of the industry. Although MBC is today a well established communication technique, there are some difficulties to be overcome before it is widely applied to mobile systems. Two most serious problems are the rather large antenna size and high transmitter power inherent to this beyond line of sight communication which relies on weak reflections of low VHF (typically 35 to 50 MHz) radio waves from ionized meteor trails. Some reduced sized antennas which can be mounted on the roofs of trucks have been tested. The problem of large peak power (a few hundred watts for mobile remotes) is much alleviated by the very low duty cycle (usually less than 1%) of remote transmitters due to their bursty transmissions responding to the probe signals from the master station via infrequent meteor reflections. In this paper, some land and maritime mobile MBC systems are brieflyintroduced.