Vanishing point and Gabor feature based multi-resolution on-road vehicle detection

Robust and reliable vehicle detection is a challenging task under the conditions of variable size and distance, various weather and illumination, cluttered background, the relative motion between the host vehicle and background. In this paper we investigate real-time vehicle detection using machine vision for active safety in vehicle applications. The conventional search method of vehicle detection is a full search one using image pyramid,which processes the image patches in same way and costs same computing time, even for no vehicle region according to prior knowledge. Our vehicle detection approach includes two basic phases. In the hypothesis generation phase, we determine the Regions of Interest (ROI) in an image according to lane vanishing points; furthermore, near, middle, and far ROIs, each with a different resolution, are extracted from the image. From the analysis of horizontal and vertical edges in the image, vehicle hypothesis lists are generated for each ROI. Finally, a hypothesis list for the whole image is obtained by combining these three lists. In the hypothesis validation phase, we propose a vehicle validation approach using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gabor feature. The experimental results show that the average right detection rate reach 90% and the average execution time is 30ms using a Pentium(R)4 CPU 2.4GHz.