Estimation of traffic sign visibility considering temporal environmental changes for smart driver assistance

We propose a visibility estimation method for traffic signs considering temporal environmental changes, as a part of work for the realization of nuisance-free driver assistance systems. Recently, the number of driver assistance systems in a vehicle is increasing. Accordingly, it is becoming important to sort out appropriate information provided from them, because providing too much information may cause driver distraction. To solve such a problem, we focus on a visibility estimation method for controlling the information according to the visibility of a traffic sign. The proposed method sequentially captures a traffic sign by an in-vehicle camera, and estimates its accumulative visibility by integrating a series of instantaneous visibility. By this way, even if the environmental conditions may change temporally and complicatedly, we can still accurately estimate the visibility that the driver perceives in an actual traffic scene. We also investigate the performance of the proposed method and show its effectiveness.