A single camera based rear obstacle detection system

This paper presents a rear obstacle detection system by using a single rear view camera. The system can detect various static and moving obstacles behind the cars. An efficient hierarchical detecting strategy is used to achieve high detection rate and low false positives. The temporal Inverse perspective mapping difference image based coarse detection is used to estimate whether there are obstacles in the predetermined warning area at first stage. Then a novel integral image based segmentation algorithm is developed for fine obstacle segmentation. Finally, the blob analysis is utilized for obstacle representation and verification. Our system achieves 94.2% detection rate and 16% false positives rate on 125 challenging video sequences. The average processing speed of the system is 25 fps on a standard laptop.