Vehicle Area Segmentation from Road Scenes Using Grid-Based Feature Values
Ku‐Jin Kim, Baek Nakhoon · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2005
Vehicle segmentation, which extracts vehicle areas from road scenes, is one of the fundamental opera tions in lots of application areas including Intelligent Transportation Systems, and so on. We present a vehicle segmentation approach for still images captured from outdoor CCD cameras mounted on the supporting poles. We first divided the input image into a set of two-dimensional grids and then calculate the feature values of the edges for each grid. Through analyzing the feature values statistically, we can find the optimal rectangular grid area of the vehicle. Our preprocessing process calculates the statistics values for the feature values from background images captured under various circumstances. For a car image, we compare its feature values to the statistics values of the background images to finally decide whether the grid belongs to the vehicle area or not. We use dynamic programming technique to find the optimal rectangular gird area from these candidate grids. Based on the statistics analysis and global search techniques, our method is more systematic compared to the previous methods which usually rely on a kind of heuristics. Additionally, the statistics analysis achieves high reliability against noises and errors due to brightness changes, camera tremors, etc. Our prototype implementation performs the vehicle segmentation in average 0.150 second for each of car images. It shows of strictly successful cases from 270 images with various kinds of noises.