In-Vehicle Stereo Vision Systems with Improved Ant Colony Optimization Based Lane Detection: A Solution to Accidents Involving Large Goods Vehicles Due to Blind Spots

This paper presents an in-vehicle stereo vision system as a solution to accidents involving large good vehicle due to blind spots using Nigeria as a case study. In this paper, a stereo-vision system was attached to the front of Large Good Vehicles (LGVs) with a view to presenting live feeds of vehicles close to the LGV vehicles and their distance away. The captured road images using the stereo vision system were optimized for effectiveness and optimal vehicle maneuvering using a modified metaheuristics algorithm called the simulated annealing Ant Colony Optimization (saACO) algorithm. The concept of simulated annealing is strategies used to automatically select the control parameters of the ACO algorithm. This helps to stabilize the performance of the ACO algorithm irrespective of the quality of the lane images captured in the in-vehicle vision system. The system is capable of notifying drivers through lane detection techniques of blind spots. This technique enables the driver to be more aware of what surrounds the vehicle and make decisions early. In order to test the system, the stereo-vision device was mounted on a Large good vehicle, driven in Zaria (a city in Kaduna state in Nigeria), and data were in the record. Out of 180 events, 42.22% of potential accident events were caused by Passenger Cars, while 27.22%, 18.33% and 12.22% were caused by two-wheelers, Large Good Vehicles and road users, respectively. In the same vein, the in-vehicle lane detection system shows a good performance of the saACO-based lane detection system and gives a better performance in comparison with the standard ACO method.

Science Letters:Blind spot detection using vision for automotive applications

This paper describes a vision-based system for blind spot detection (BSD) in intelligent vehicle applications. A camera is mounted in the lateral mirror of a car with the intention of visually detecting cars that are located in the so-called blind spot and cannot be perceived by the vehicle driver. The detection of cars in the blind spot is carried out using computer vision techniques, based on optical flow and a double-stage data clustering technique for robust vehicle detection.

Blind Spot Obstacle Detection from Monocular Camera Images with Depth Cues Extracted by CNN

The images from a monocular camera can be processed to detect depth information regarding obstacles in the blind spot area captured by the side-view camera of a vehicle.The depth information is given as a classification result“near”or“far”when two blocks in the image are compared with respect to their distances and the depth information can be used for the purpose of blind spot area detection.In this paper,the proposed depth information is inferred from a combination of blur cues and texture cues.The depth information is estimated by comparing the features of two image blocks selected within a single image.A preliminary experiment demonstrates that a convolutional neural network(CNN)model trained by deep learning with a set of relatively ideal images achieves good accuracy.The same CNN model is applied to distinguish near and far obstacles according to a specified threshold in the vehicle blind spot area,and the promising results are obtained.The proposed method uses a standard blind spot camera and can improve safety without other additional sensing devices.Thus,the proposed approach has the potential to be applied in vehicular applications for the detection of objects in the driver’s blind spot.