On-road vehicle detection using optical sensors: a review

As one of the most promising applications of computer vision, vision-based vehicle detection for driver assistance has received considerable attention over the last 15 years. There are at least three reasons for the blooming research in this field: first, the startling losses both in human lives and finance caused by vehicle accidents; second, the availability of feasible technologies accumulated within the last 30 years of computer vision research; and third, the exponential growth of processor speed has paved the way for running computation-intensive video-processing algorithms even on a low-end PC in realtime. This paper provides a critical survey of recent vision-based on-road vehicle detection systems appeared in the literature (i.e., the cameras are mounted on the vehicle rather than being static such as in traffic/driveway monitoring systems).