Robust Inter-Vehicle Distance Estimation Method Based on Monocular Vision

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) based on monocular vision are rapidly becoming a popular research subject. In ADAS, inter-vehicle distance estimation from an in-car camera based on monocular vision is critical. At present, related methods based on a monocular vision for measuring the absolute distance of vehicles ahead experience accuracy problems in terms of the ranging result, which is low, and the deviation of the ranging result between different types of vehicles, which is large and easily affected by a change in the attitude angle. To improve the robustness of a distance estimation system, an improved method for estimating the distance of a monocular vision vehicle based on the detection and segmentation of the target vehicle is proposed in this paper to address the vehicle attitude angle problem. The angle regression model (ARN) is used to obtain the attitude angle information of the target vehicle. The dimension estimation network determines the actual dimensions of the target vehicle. Then, a 2D base vector geometric model is designed in accordance with the image analytic geometric principle to accurately recover the back area of the target vehicle. Lastly, area–distance modeling based on the principle of camera projection is performed to estimate distance. The experimental results on the real-world computer vision benchmark, KITTI, indicate that our approach achieves superior performance compared with other existing published methods for different types of vehicles (including front and sideway vehicles).