• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.181-189
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• 2004

This paper describes the method for detecting vehicles in the rear and rear-side at night by using headlight features. A headlight is the outstanding feature that can be used to discriminate a vehicle from a dark background. In the segmentation process, a night image is transformed to a binary image that consists of black background and white regions by gray-level thresholding, and noise in the binary image is eliminated by a morphological operation. In the feature extraction process, the geometric features and moment invariant features of a headlight are defined, and they are measured in each segmented region. Regions that are not appropriate to a headlight are filtered by using geometric feature measurement. In region classification, a pair of headlights is detected by using relational features based on the symmetry of a pair of headlights. Experimental results show that this method is very applicable to an approaching vehicle detection system at nighttime.