Night time vehicle detection for driving assistance lightbeam controller

In this paper we present an effective system for detecting vehicles in front of a camera-assisted vehicle (preceding vehicles traveling in the same direction and oncoming vehicles traveling in the opposite direction) during night time driving conditions in order to automatically change vehicle head lights between low beams and high beams avoiding glares for the drivers. Accordingly, high beams output will be selected when no other traffic is present and will be turned on low beams when other vehicles are detected. Our systemuses a B&W micro-camera mounted in the windshield area and looking at forward of the vehicle. Digital image processing techniques are applied to analyze light sources and to detect vehicles in the images. The algorithm is efficient and able to run in real-time. Some experimental results and conclusions are presented.