Systems and methods for efficient information extraction in traffic monitoring

A surveillance method, comprising:

• generating full-quality image data from an image of a vehicle captured by an imaging unit;
• converting the full-quality image data to reduced-quality image data;
• processing the reduced-quality image data to generate subsector data defining one or more subsectors of the captured image;
• and
• identifying one or more specific vehicle characteristics within the one or more subsectors by applying image recognition processing on the full-quality image data only within the one or more subsectors, wherein the reduced-quality image data is insufficient for the image recognition processing to identify specific vehicle characteristics therefrom.

An image processing method, comprising:

• generating full-quality image data from a captured image of an object;
• converting the full-quality image data to reduced-quality image data;
• processing the reduced-quality image data to generate subsector data defining one or more subsectors of the captured image;
• and
• identifying one or more specific object characteristics within the one or more subsectors by applying image recognition processing on the full-quality image data only within the one or more subsectors, wherein the reduced-quality image data is insufficient for the image recognition processing to identify specific object characteristics therefrom.