Detection and tracking of overtaking vehicles

Sammanfattning: The car has become bigger, faster and more advanced for each passing year since its first appearance, and the safety requirements have also become stricter. Computer vision based support is a growing area of safety features where the car is equipped with a mono- or stereo camera. It can be used for detecting pedestrians walking out in the street, give a warning for wild-life during a cold January night using night-vision cameras and much more. This master thesis investigates the problem of detecting and tracking overtaking vehicles. Vehicles that overtake are only partly visible in the beginning, rendering it hard for standard detection/classification algorithms to get a positive detection. The need to quickly detect an incoming vehicle is crucial to be able to take fast counter-measure, such as braking, if needed. A novel approach referred to as the \textit{Wall detector} is suggested, detecting incoming vehicles using one-dimensional optical flow. Under the assumption that an overtaking car is moving in parallel to the ego-vehicle, both cars are moving towards the vanishing point in the image. A detection wall, consisting of several detection lines moving towards the vanishing point, is created, making all objects that are moving parallel to the ego-vehicle move along these lines. The result is a light-weight and fast detector with good detection performance in real-time. Several approaches for the Wall detector are implemented and evaluated, revealing that a feature based approach is the best choice. The information from the system can be used as input to heavier algorithms, boosting the confidence or to initialize a track.