A generic obstacle detection method for collision avoidance

Obstacle detection is an important component in driver assistance as it helps systems to locate obstacles and then to prevent collisions. The aim of this study is to develop an obstacle detection module through digital images processing. We present a hybrid stereo vision-based method that combines stereo matching and homographic transformation methods. We use a sparse matching method in order to get a rapid geometric representation of the road scene that allows us to extract the upper and lower parts of obstacles. According to the position of the lower part, our method uses either the dense stereo matching or the homographic transformation methods to extract the candidate obstacles regions. A verification test is performed to verify whether the retained region is an obstacle or not. In order to avoid collisions, we compute the distance to the preceding obstacle to maintain the vehicle carrying the camera at a safety distance. The method presented here was tested on DIPLODOC road stereo sequence captured on a highway. The obtained results prove the efficiency of our proposed method.