Estimation of Angular Acceleration By a Monocular Vision Sensor

Recently, monitoring of two-body ground vehicles carrying extremely hazardous materials has been considered as one of the most important national issues. This issue induces large cost in terms of national economy and social benefit. To monitor and counteract accidents promptly, an efficient methodology is required. For accident monitoring, GPS can be utilized in most cases. However, it is widely known that GPS cannot provide sufficient continuity in urban cannons and tunnels. To complement the weakness of GPS, this paper proposes an accident monitoring method based on a monocular vision sensor. The proposed method estimates angular acceleration from a sequence of image frames captured by a monocular vision sensor. The possibility of using angular acceleration is investigated to determine the occurrence of accidents such as jackknifing and rollover. By an experiment based on actual measurements, the feasibility of the proposed method is evaluated.