Moving Obstacle Detection using Monocular Vision

• Published in: 2006 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium pp. 288 - 293
• Main Authors: Yamaguchi, K., Kato, T., Ninomiya, Y.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2006
• Subjects: Cameras; Image motion analysis; Laser radar; Layout; Nonlinear optics; Optical sensors; Radar detection; Road vehicles; Robustness; Vehicle detection
• ISBN: 490112286X; 9784901122863
• ISSN: 1931-0587
• DOI: 10.1109/IVS.2006.1689643

This paper proposes a method for detecting moving obstacles on roads, by using a vehicle mounted monocular camera. To detect various moving obstacles, such as vehicles and pedestrians, the ego-motion of the vehicle is initially estimated from images captured by the camera. There are two problems in ego-motion estimation. Firstly, a typical road scene contains moving obstacles. This causes false estimation of the ego-motion. Secondly, roads possess fewer features, when compared to the number associated with background structures. This reduces the accuracy of ego-motion estimation. In our approach, the ego-motion is estimated from the correspondences of dispersed feature points extracted from various regions other than those that contain moving obstacles. After estimating the ego-motion, any moving obstacles are detected by tracking the feature points over consecutive frames. In our experiments, it has been shown that the proposed method is able to detect moving obstacles