A Simplified Review on Video Analysis to Detect and Track the Road Ahead for Safety

This is a review paper on real-time in-car video analysis to detect and track road ahead for safety, auto driving, and target tracing. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to localizing target vehicles in video under various environmental conditions. The extracted geometry features from the video are continuously projected onto a 1-D profile and are constantly tracked. We rely on temporal information of features and their motion behaviors for vehicle identification, which compensates for the complexity in recognizing vehicle shapes, colors, and types. We probabilistically model the motion in the field of view according to the scene characteristic and the vehicle motion model. The hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to separate target vehicles from the background and track them probabilistically. We have investigated videos of day and night on different types of roads, showing that our approach is robust and effective in dealing with changes in environment and illumination and that real-time processing becomes possible for vehicle-borne camera.