Localization of objects in automotive scenes with spatial and temporal information

In the context of automotive driving assistance, this paper describes a generic (i.e. applicable to both vehicle interior and exterior scenes) vision based approach for scene content analysis. It makes use of temporal and spatial information from a stereoscopic sequence of images to localize objects and estimate their position and motion. The proposed method is divided into three steps. First, image features are selected, tracked and reconstructed in the 3D world space. Second, a clustering step is processed in the 5D space made of the positions and 2D motions parameters. The last step is devoted to clusters interpretation: it is out of the scope of the paper, however orientations are given to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed approach. The paper is organized as follows: first, the use of temporal and spatial information from a stereoscopic sequence is investigated. A state of the art of existing methods is presented. Then, a generic approach for object segmentation is proposed. Lastly, experimental results are presented.