Vehicle Detection with Three Dimensional Object Models

A new approach for vehicle detection handles the problem of multiple views of a car. The sensor information of a laser scanner and a video sensor is fused. The laser scanner estimates the distance as well as the contour information of observed objects. The contour information can be used to identify the discrete sides of rectangular objects in the laser scanner coordinate system. The transformation of the three dimensional coordinates of the most visible side to the image coordinate system allows for a reconstruction of its original view. This transformation also determines the object size in the video image. Afterwards, a pattern recognition algorithm can classify the object´s sides based on contour and shape information