Real time on-road vehicle detection with low-level visual features and boosted cascade of haar-like features

This paper presents a real- time detection of on-road succeeding vehicles based on low level edge features and a boosted cascade of Haar-like features. At first, the candidate vehicle location in an image is found by low level horizontal edge and symmetry characteristic of vehicle. Then a boosted cascade of the Haar-like features is applied to the initial hypothesized vehicle location to extract the refined vehicle location. The initial hypothesis generation using simple edge features speeds up the whole detection process and the application of a trained cascade on the hypothesized location increases the accuracy of the detection process. Experimental results on real world road scenario with processing speed of up to 27 frames per second for 720x480 pixel images are presented. © ICROS 2011.