Real-time multiple vehicle detection and tracking from a moving vehicle

A real-time vision system has been developed that analyzes color videos tak en from a forward-looking video camera in a car driving on a highway. The s ystem uses a combination of color, edge, and motion information to recogniz e and track the road boundaries, lane markings and other vehicles on the ro ad. Cars are recognized by matching templates that are cropped from the inp ut data online and by detecting highway scene features and evaluating how t hey relate to each other. Cars are also detected by temporal differencing a nd by tracking motion parameters that are typical for cars. The system reco gnizes and tracks road boundaries and lane markings using a recursive least -squares filter. Experimental results demonstrate robust, real-time car det ection and tracking over thousands of image frames. The data includes video taken under difficult visibility conditions.