关键词: 行车安全, 车距估计, 超车检测, 行车监控, 安全预警, 统一设备架构

Abstract: To improve the safety of vehicles while driving, a computer vision-based inter-vehicle distance estimation and warning method was proposed in this paper. First, shadow detection method was applied to detect shadow of cars ahead, and inter-vehicle distance estimation function was built based on the distance between shadow and vision center of a frame. Then, estimation equations for non-threatened background optical flow was built, and by judging optical flow with the estimation equations, the abnormal objects could be separated from others, thus the overtaking event could be recognized. Based on the inter-vehicle distance and detection of overtaking event, the driver could be timely warned of the potential safety hazard. The experimental results prove that the proposed method can estimate inter-vehicle distance and detect overtaking event accurately. Finally, NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) was used to accelerate the algorithm on Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) platform and achieve the processing speed of 48.9 ms per frame which basically meets the real-time processing demand.

Key words: driving safety, inter-vehicle distance estimation, overtaking detection, vehicle surveillance, safety warning, Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)