A Night Vision Module for the Detection of Distant Pedestrians

This paper presents a monocular night vision system specifically developed for detecting very distant pedestrians. The focus of the system is the recognition of pedestrians that are between 40 and 100 m away from the camera. The system is intended to integrate with an existing system, which is capable of detecting pedestrians at distances less than 40 m. At very large distances, pedestrians appear at low resolution, and this requires a specific detection algorithm, rather than an adaptation of an existing one. The presented system performs best in rural environments, where it can locate pedestrians at such great distances, that the pedestrians are hardly visible even to a human driver.