Nighttime Brake-Light Detection by Nakagami Imaging

Given the rapid expansion of car ownership worldwide, vehicle safety is an increasingly critical issue in the automobile industry. The reduced cost of cameras and optical devices has made it economically feasible to deploy front-mounted intelligent systems for visual-based event detection for forward collision avoidance and mitigation. While driving at night, vehicles in front are generally visible by their taillights and brake lights. The brake lights are particularly important because they signal deceleration and potential collision. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel visual-based approach, based on the Nakagami-m distribution, for detecting brake lights at night by analyzing the taillights. Rather than using the knowledge of the heuristic features, such as the symmetry, position, and size of the rear-facing vehicle, we focus on finding the invariant features to model brake light scattering by Nakagami imaging and therefore conduct the detection process in a part-based manner. Experiments on an extensive data set show that our proposed system can effectively detect vehicle braking under different lighting and traffic conditions and thus demonstrates its feasibility in real-world environments.