• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.269-275
• /
• 2017

Automatic vehicle detection is a very important function for autonomous vehicles. Conventional vehicle detection approaches are based on visible-light images obtained from cameras mounted on a vehicle in the daytime. However, unlike daytime, a visible-light image is generally dark at night, and the contrast is low, which makes it difficult to recognize a vehicle. As a feature point that can be used even in the low light conditions of nighttime, the rear lamp is virtually unique. However, conventional rear lamp-based detection methods seldom cope with atypical lamps, such as LED lamps, or flashing turn signals. In this paper, we detect atypical lamps by blurring the lamp area with a low pass filter (LPF) to make out the lamp shape. We also propose to detect flickering of the turn signal lamp in a manner such that the lamp area is vertically projected, and the maximum difference of two paired lamps is examined. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a higher F-measure value of 0.24 than the conventional lamp pairing-based detection methods, on average. In addition, the proposed algorithm shows a fast processing time of 6.4 ms per frame, which verifies real-time performance of the proposed algorithm.