• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.439-449
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• 2014

In this paper, a novel vision-based nighttime vehicle detection approach is presented, combining state machines and downhill simplex optimization. In the proposed approach, vehicle detection is modeled as a sequential state transition problem; that is, vehicle arrival, moving, and departure at a chosen detection area. More specifically, the number of bright pixels and their differences, in a chosen area of interest, are calculated and fed into the proposed state machine to detect vehicles. After a vehicle is detected, the location of the headlights is determined using the downhill simplex method. In the proposed optimization process, various headlights were evaluated for possible headlight positions on the detected vehicles; allowing for an optimal headlight position to be located. Simulation results were provided to show the robustness of the proposed approach for nighttime vehicle and headlight detection.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.663-672
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• 2023

Most vehicle detection methods have poor vehicle feature extraction performance at night, and their robustness is reduced; hence, this study proposes a night vehicle detection method based on style transfer image enhancement. First, a style transfer model is constructed using cycle generative adversarial networks (cycleGANs). The daytime data in the BDD100K dataset were converted into nighttime data to form a style dataset. The dataset was then divided using its labels. Finally, based on a YOLOv5s network, a nighttime vehicle image is detected for the reliable recognition of vehicle information in a complex environment. The experimental results of the proposed method based on the BDD100K dataset show that the transferred night vehicle images are clear and meet the requirements. The precision, recall, mAP@.5, and mAP@.5:.95 reached 0.696, 0.292, 0.761, and 0.454, respectively.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.269-275
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• 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.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.8-15
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• 2011

This paper presents an effective method for detecting vehicles in front of the camera-assisted car during nighttime driving. The proposed method detects vehicles based on detecting vehicle headlights and taillights using techniques of image segmentation and clustering. First, in order to effectively extract spotlight of interest, a pre-signal-processing process based on camera lens filter and labeling method is applied on road-scene images. Second, to spatial clustering vehicle of detecting lamps, a grouping process use light tracking method and locating vehicle lighting patterns. For simulation, we are implemented through Da-vinci 7437 DSP board with visible light mono-camera and tested it in urban and rural roads. Through the test, classification performances are above 89% of precision rate and 94% of recall rate evaluated on real-time environment.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.270-274
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• 2015

We suggest that HSV Color Space may be used to detect a vehicle detecting system at nighttime. It is essential that a licence plate should be extracted when a vehicle is under surveillance. To do so, a licence plate may be enlarged to certain size after the aimed vehicle is taken picture from a distance by using Pan-Tilt-Zoom Camera. Either Mean-Shift or Optical Flow Algorithm is generally used for the purpose of a vehicle detection and trace, even though those algorithms have tendency to have difficulty in detection and trace a vehicle at night. By utilizing the fact that a headlight or taillight of a vehicle stands out when an input image is converted in to HSV Color Space, we are able to achieve improvement on those algorithms for the vehicle detection and trace. In this paper, we have shown that at night, the suggested method is efficient enough to detect a vehicle 93.9% from the front and 97.7% from the back.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.311-317
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• 2011

The blind spot is an area where drivers visibility does not reach. When drivers change a lane to adjacent lane, they need to give an attention because of the blind spot. If drivers try to change lane without notice of vehicle approaching in the blind spot, it causes a reason to have a car accident. This paper proposes a night-time blind spot vehicle detection using cameras. At nighttime, head-lights are used as characteristics to detect vehicles. Candidates of headlight are selected by high luminance feature and then shape filter and kalman filter are employed to remove other noisy blobs having similar luminance to head-lights. In addition, vehicle position is estimated from detected head-light, using virtual center line represented by approximated the first order linear equation. Experiments show that proposed method has relatively high detection porformance in clear weather independent to the road types, but has not sufficient performance in rainy weather because of various ground reflectors.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.163-172
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• 2012

A driver assistance system is critical to improve a convenience and stability of vehicle driving. Several systems have been already commercialized such as adaptive cruise control system and forward collision warning system. Efficient vehicle detection is very important to improve such driver assistance systems. Most existing vehicle detection systems are based on a radar system, which measures distance between a host and leading (or oncoming) vehicles under various weather conditions. However, it requires high deployment cost and complexity overload when there are many vehicles. A camera based vehicle detection technique is also good alternative method because of low cost and simple implementation. In general, night time vehicle detection is more complicated than day time vehicle detection, because it is much more difficult to distinguish the vehicle's features such as outline and color under the dim environment. This paper proposes a method to detect vehicles at night time using analysis of a captured color space with reduction of reflection and other light sources in images. Four colors spaces, namely RGB, YCbCr, normalized RGB and Ruta-RGB, are compared each other and evaluated. A suboptimal threshold value is determined by Otsu algorithm and applied to extract candidates of taillights of leading vehicles. Statistical features such as mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and entropy are extracted from the candidate regions and used as feature vector for SVM(Support Vector Machine) classifier. According to our simulation results, the proposed statistical feature based SVM provides relatively high performances of leading vehicle detection with various distances in variable nighttime environments.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.1556-1567
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• 2009

The death rate of pedestrian in car accidents in Korea is 2.5 times higher than the average of OECD countries'. If a system that can detect pedestrians and send alarm to drivers is built and reduces the rate, it is worth developing such a pedestrian detection system (PDS). Since the accident rate in which pedestrians are involved is higher at nighttime than in daytime, the adoption of nighttime PDS is being standardized by big auto companies. However, they are usually using night visions or multiple sensors, which are usually expensive. In this paper we suggest a method for nighttime PDS using single wide dynamic range (WDR) monochrome camera in visible spectrum band. In our experiments, pedestrians were accurately detected if only most edges of pedestrians could be obtained.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.157-163
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• 2019

The LiDAR sensor, which is widely regarded as one of the most important sensors, has recently undergone active commercialization owing to the significant growth in the production of ADAS and autonomous vehicle components. The LiDAR sensor technology involves radiating a laser beam at a particular angle and acquiring a three-dimensional image by measuring the lapsed time of the laser beam that has returned after being reflected. The LiDAR sensor has been incorporated and utilized in various devices such as drones and robots. This study focuses on object detection and recognition by employing sensor fusion. Object detection and recognition can be executed as a single function by incorporating sensors capable of recognition, such as image sensors, optical sensors, and propagation sensors. However, a single sensor has limitations with respect to object detection and recognition, and such limitations can be overcome by employing multiple sensors. In this paper, the performance of an eight-channel scanning LiDAR was evaluated and an object detection algorithm based on it was implemented. Furthermore, object detection characteristics during daytime and nighttime in a real road environment were verified. Obtained experimental results corroborate that an excellent detection performance of 92.87% can be achieved.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.73-83
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• 2019

In this paper, we propose the augmented reality(AR) based driving navigation based on robust lane detection method to dynamic environment changes. The proposed technique uses the detected lane position as a marker which is a key element for enhancing driving information. We propose Symmetrical Local Threshold(SLT) algorithm which is able to robustly detect lane to dynamic illumination environment change such as shadows. In addition, by using Morphology operation and Connected Component Analysis(CCA) algorithm, it is possible to minimize noises in the image, and Region Of Interest(ROI) is defined through region division using a straight line passing through several vanishing points We also propose the augmented reality aided visualization method for Interchange(IC) and driving navigation using reference point detection based on the detected lane coordinates inside and outside the ROI. Validation experiments were carried out to assess the accuracy and robustness of the proposed system in vairous environment changes. The average accuracy of the proposed system in daytime, nighttime, rainy day, and cloudy day is 79.3% on 4600 images. The results of the proposed system for AR based IC and driving navigation were also presented. We are hopeful that the proposed research will open a new discussion on AR based driving navigation platforms, and thus, that such efforts will enrich the autonomous vehicle services in the near future.