Vision-based vehicle tracking via a noise-tolerant optical flow method
Nasser Kehtarnavaz, Jeong‐Tae Kim · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
Vehicle-tracking is defined as an autonomous vehicle following a lead vehicle based on the observed range and heading angle of the lead vehicle. This paper presents a vision-based vehicle tracking algorithm for obtaining the range and heading angle information. The developed algorithm utilizes the minimization of an energy function reflecting the optical flow of a specified shape on the lead vehicle and the gradient of its edges. The embedded optical flow method is capable of tolerating intensity variations or environmental noise generated by light and background sources. This noise tolerance is achieved by employing a response function which adapts to the distribution of a similarity measure within a moving search window. Several examples are shown to illustrate the performance of this tracking algorithm in realistic outdoor scenes.