A New Ground Movement Compensation Approach for Obstacle Detection Using an In-Vehicle Camera

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to detect obstacles using a single camera mounted on a vehicle when the vehicle is backing or turning round at an intersection at a low speed. Using equations among feature point locations and optical flows in geometrically converted top-view images, ground-movement information can be estimated. We compensate for the ground movement between consecutive top-view images using the estimated ground-movement information and compute the difference image using the compensated previous top-view image and current top-view image. Finally, obstacle regions in top-view images can be easily extracted using the difference image. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be effective by evaluation images captured by an in-vehicle camera.