Vision-based vehicle detection for nighttime with discriminately trained mixture of weighted deformable part models

Vehicle detection at night time is a challenging problem due to low visibility and light distortion caused by motion and illumination in urban environments. This paper presents a method based on the deformable object model for detecting and classifying vehicles by using monocular infra-red cameras. As some features of vehicles, such as headlight and taillights are more visible at night time, we propose a weighted version of the deformable part model. We define weights for different features in the deformable part model of the vehicle and try to learn the weights through an enormous number of positive and negative samples. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the algorithm for detecting close and medium range vehicles in urban scenes at night time.