Vision-based pedestrian detection and estimation with a blind corner camera

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2006 in the subject Electrotechnology, grade: 1,0, University Karlsruhe (TH), language: English, abstract: Avoiding collision accidents is becoming more and more an important topic in the research field of driver assistant systems. Especially for vision-based detection systems there are various approaches, which are built upon many different methods. This thesis deals with the avoidance of pedestrian accidents, caused by Blind Corner view problems. The presented approach comprises a pedestrian detection subsystem, which is part of a large camera system framework covering observation of the car environment. Based on a Blind Corner Camera and a neural network classification method, research in this thesis is focused on two aspects: detection improvement and danger level estimation. Since vision-based classification methods usually are still not able to yield perfect results, because of the complexity of this task, the detection result has to be improved by preprocessing and post processing. In this work, first, effects of image enhancement methods on detection are tested as preprocessing methods and, secondly, a new approach for a simple tracking and estimation strategy is presented, which improves detection in the way of a post processing method. Finally, information from tracking and prediction is used to estimate a danger level for pedestrians, which provides information about how collisionprone the current situations is.