Camera-based Forward Collision and Lane Departure Warning Systems Using SVM

This paper presents a unique camera-based Forward Collision Warning (FCW) and Lane Departure Warning (LDW) system to improve the safety of road vehicle transportation. The video used in the algorithm is captured by an in-car camera. Initially, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied to the first frame of the video to locate the moving vehicle of interest in front of the host vehicle. Following this step, two separate warning systems, namely FCW and LDW are designed. For the FCW, the Time to Collision (TTC) is determined through the scale change method, and the FCW system will be activated when TTC is less than a predefined threshold value. For the LDW system, the lane position information is analyzed and the warning is triggered if there is a lane departure without the use of blinkers. The proposed camera based system can provide advantages over the traditional radar/laser based warning systems, in which both the LDW and the FCW information cannot be provided with the same system. Furthermore, the proposed system provides additional flexibility at a lower cost.