A Fast Evolutionary Algorithm for Real-Time Vehicle Detection

The evolutionary algorithm (EA) is an effective method for solving various problems because it can search through very large search spaces and can quickly come to nearly optimal solutions. However, existing EA-based methods for vehicle detection cannot achieve high performance because their fitness functions depend on sensitive information, such as edge or color information on the preceding vehicle. This paper focuses on improving the performance of existing evolutionary-based methods for vehicle detection by introducing an effective fitness function that can more accurately capture a vehicle´s information by combining a disparity map, edge information, and the position and motion of the preceding vehicle. The proposed method can detect multiple vehicles by using a turn-back genetic algorithm (GA) and can prevent false detection by using motion detection. Our fitness function is designed in a typical manner along with the fitness parameters. These parameters are usually selected using heuristic methods, making the choice of optimal parameters difficult. Therefore, this paper proposes a new approach to estimating optimal fitness parameters using EA and the least squares method. Robustness testing showed that the proposed method provides detection rate (DR) results close to those obtained using a state-of-the-art system and outperforms other dominant vehicle-detection-based EAs.