An improved technique for Night-time Vehicle detection

Autonomous vehicles are mainly dependent on Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). One of the most important feature in ADAS is vehicle detection. There are many methods for vehicle detection at day time. However, during night-time vehicle detection, ADAS has to depend solely on tail-light of the vehicles ahead. Street lights and other bright lights are of major concern in this scenario. In developing countries like India, vehicles with only one functional tail-light are also allowed on road. In this paper, we propose two improvised methods for night-time vehicle detection using forward facing optical camera. First method is for improving accuracy in dual tail-light functional case and the other for improving accuracy in single tail-light scenario. Vehicle with only one functional tail-light were detected using non-divergent optical flow points clustered with the functional tail-light. The proposed algorithm has been tested in actual traffic scenarios.