Real Time Vision Based Overtaking Assistance System for Drivers at Night on Two-Lane Single Carriageway

In this article, an effective solution has been presented to assist a driver in taking decisions for overtaking under adverse night time dark condition on a two-lane single carriageway road. Here, an awkward situation of the road where a vehicle is just in front of the test vehicle in the same direction and another vehicle coming from the opposite direction is considered. As the environmental condition is very dark, so only headlights and taillights of any vehicle are visible. Estimation of distance and speed with greater accuracy, especially at night where vehicles are not visible is really a challenging task. The proposed assistance system can estimate the actual and relative speed and the distance of the slow vehicle in front of the test vehicle and the vehicle coming from the opposite direction by observing taillights and headlights respectively. Subsequently, required gap, road condition level, speed and acceleration for safe overtaking are estimated. Finally, the overtaking decision is made in a such way that there should not be any collision between vehicles. Several real time experiments reveal that the estimation achieves a great accuracy with safe condition over the state-of-the-art techniques using a low-cost 2D camera.