Vehicles distance estimation using detection of vanishing point

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to study distance determination in vehicles, which could allow an in-car system to provide feedback and alert drivers, by either prompting the driver to take preventative action or prepare the vehicle’s safety systems for an imminent collision. The success of a new system's deploying allows drivers to oppose the huge number of accidents and the material losses and costs associated with car accidents. Design/methodology/approach In this context, this paper presents estimation distance between camera and frontal vehicles based on camera calibration by combining three main steps: vanishing point extraction, lanes detection and vehicles detection in the field of 3 D real scene. This algorithm was implemented in MATLAB, and it was applied on scenes containing several vehicles in highway urban area. The method starts with the camera calibration. Then, the distance information can be calculated. Findings Based on experiment performance, this new method achieves robustness especially for detecting and estimating distances for multiple vehicles in a single scene. Also, this method demonstrates a higher accuracy detection rate of 0.869 in an execution time of 2.382 ms. Originality/value The novelty of the proposed method consists firstly on the use of an adaptive segmentation to reject the false points of interests. Secondly, the use of vanishing point has reduced the cost of using memory. Indeed, the part of the image above the vanishing point will not be processed and therefore will be deleted. The last benefit is the application of this new method on structured roads.