Application of optical flow for automated overtaking control

In this paper the problem of automated control of a road vehicle is addressed. In particular, a system is presented where optical flow techniques are applied to monitor overtaking maneuvers of other vehicles coming from the rear of the car. During car driving, most visual information is conveyed by the motion perceived within the visual field. The proposed approach for overtaking control is based on the computation of the optical flow (or the normal flow) from an image stream acquired from a camera sensor mounted on board of the vehicle. The method applies for a road vehicle and constitutes a building block of a software and hardware architecture devised to provide helpful information as an aid to the driver. Several experiments are presented from real image sequences