Computer vision based object detection and recognition for vehicle driving

Applying computer technology to vehicle driving has been studied for many years. Most of the studies focused on autonomous vehicle driving in a simplified environment like freeways, or life independent systems like GPS. A general case where kind of unexpectedly fatal conditions may occur which we are driving in an urban area, however, has not been considered. We proposed a system to satisfy the basic criteria for such a general driving assistance. We detect the obstacles on the ground in front of the vehicle we are driving, and then classify them into three predefined categories: pedestrians, vehicles and others. In the proposed system, we exploit a simplified stereovision system to detect the obstacles instantly. After that, to search and track pedestrians and vehicles, different methods are used for adapting to their heterogeneity. For the sake of implementation, we also propose a method to decide the maximal speed of driving to keep such kind of systems working.