Multiple vehicle detection and tracking in hard real-time

A vision system is developed that recognizes and tracks multiple cars from sequences of gray-scale images taken from a moving car in hard real-time. The recognition method is based on feature detection, online deformable template matching, and temporal differencing. The vision system utilizes the hard real-time operating system Maruti which guarantees that the timing constraints on the various processes of the vision system are satisfied. The dynamic creation and termination of tracking processes optimizes the amount of computation resources spent and allows fast real-time recognition and tracking of multiple cars as demonstrated over a large number of image frames