Image acquisition method with wide dynamic range of moving objects for ITS

In a driver assistant system and a traffic flow monitoring system for ITS, a vision sensor with wide dynamic range is necessary. For imaging target objects under outside environment, dynamic range with 1.5*10/sup 4/ is required, although that of a conventional CCD camera is about 5*10/sup 2/. Our developed sensing system can expand the dynamic range of an image by combining a pair of images successively taken under different exposure conditions. To apply this sensing system to moving objects, a displacement of the target object in a pair of images resulting from motion of the object is evaluated by a normalized correlation method. The experimental results with a miniature car showed the effectiveness of our developed sensing system.