Moving obstacle detection using monocular vision

This paper proposes a method for detecting moving obstacles on roads, by using a vehicle mounted monocular camera. To detect various moving obstacles, such as vehicles and pedestrians, the ego-motion of the vehicle is initially estimated from images captured by the camera. There are two problems in ego-motion estimation. Firstly, a typical road scene contains moving obstacles. This causes false estimation of the ego-motion. Secondly, roads possess fewer features, when compared to the number associated with background structures. This reduces the accuracy of egomotion estimation. In our approach, the ego-motion is estimated from the correspondences of dispersed feature points extracted from various regions other than those that contain moving obstacles. After estimating the ego-motion, any moving obstacles are detected by tracking the feature points over consecutive frames. In our experiments, it has been shown that the proposed method is able to detect moving obstacles.