A real time distance headway measurement method using stereo and optical flow

The authors have been studying various technologies to measure distance values using image processing, especially binocular stereo images, for Advanced Safety Vehicle projects. A problem concerning the stereo images is a high computational cost. It is possible to extract optical flow with a low computational cost under some constraint condition in time varying images. The authors present a video rate distance headway measurement method using stereo image processing combined with optical flow. They describe the structures and algorithms of the distance headway measurement method and show the experimental results