Localization of ahead vehicles with on-board stereo cameras

This paper introduces a vision based algorithm that detects and localizes ahead vehicles elaborating images taken by a stereo camera installed on an intelligent vehicle. The algorithm is based on the analysis of stereo images, estimating the ground plane by least square fitting of disparity data, and segmenting the obstacles by a rule based split/merge strategy. Quantitative experiments on complex real world sequences validate the approach. The method is demonstrated to operate in real-time.