Vision-Based Front Vehicle Detection and Its Distance Estimation

Vision-based driver assistant systems are very promising in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This paper will propose a system that can detect front vehicles and estimate the nearest car distance from the host car. In a companion paper, we have developed a scene analysis module that deals with scene segmentation and natural object labeling of forward-looking images by the use of fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (ART) and fuzzy inference techniques. Based on this technique, the proposed system can detect the front vehicles and then estimate the distance of the nearest car from us. The validity of our proposed scheme in car detection and the distance estimation was verified to be very successful by field-test experiments.