Tracking cars in range image sequences

Cars will eventually be equipped with a control system to either warn the driver when he gets too close to another car, or even to keep him automatically at an adequate distance. In both cases automatic traffic scene analysis will be needed. We want to base this on a new optical range sensor which acquires distance and intensity information. We present a detection and tracking scheme which is fast, simple and operates with a small basic instruction set. Our region growing algorithm ensures robust segmentation and detects objects even in ambiguous data. Objects are represented by bounding boxes and tracked along the image sequence. The tracking process also provides the velocities for calculating the time to collision with each object. We show results of some experiments with simulated traffic scenes.