Road detection and vehicles tracking by vision for an on-board ACC system in the VELAC vehicle

The paper presents a method designed to detect and track vehicles on highway in a safety improvement purpose. The goal of this kind of system is to regulate the speed of a vehicle so as to respect safety distances relative to vehicles ahead. The method is exclusively based on monocular computer vision and uses two algorithms. The first one is able to locate the lane borders in the image, and to deduce the 3D shape of the road axis. The second algorithm detects, tracks and computes the 3D location of vehicles ahead by using fixed lights embedded on these vehicles. By combining the results of the two algorithms, a fusion step permits us to know were the most dangerous vehicle is, according to its position, speed and circulation lane. The method has been implemented on our experimental vehicle VELAC and the whole system operates in real time conditions.