Development of a Vision Sensor-based Vehicle Detection System

Preceding vehicle detection is a crucial issue for driver assistance system as well as for autonomous vehicle guidance function and it has to be performed with high reliability to avoid any potential collision. The vision-based preceded vehicle detection systems are regarded promising for this purpose because they require little infrastructure on a highway. However, the feasibility of these systems in passenger car requires accurate and robust sensing performance. In this paper, an preceded vehicle detection system is developed using stereo vision sensors. This system utilizes feature matching, epipoplar constraint and feature aggregation in order to robustly detect the initial corresponding pairs. After the initial detection, the system executes the tracking algorithm for the preceded vehicles including a leading vehicle. Then, the position parameters of the preceded vehicles or leading vehicles can be obtained. The proposed preceded vehicle detection system is implemented on a passenger car and its performances is verified experimentally.