A Real-Time Multi-scale Vehicle Detection and Tracking Approach for Smartphones

Automated vehicle detection is a research field in constant evolution due to the new technological advances and security requirements demanded by the current intelligent transportation systems. For these reasons, in this paper we present a vision-based vehicle detection and tracking pipeline, which is able to run on an iPhone in real time. An approach based on smartphone cameras supposes a versatile solution and an alternative to other expensive and complex sensors on the vehicle, such as LiDAR or other range-based methods. A multi-scale proposal and simple geometry consideration of the roads based on the vanishing point are combined to overcome the computational constraints. Our algorithm is tested on a publicly available road dataset, thus demonstrating its real applicability to ADAS or autonomous driving.