Assisted driving and unmanned driving have been areas of focus for both industry and academia. Front-vehicle detection technology, a key component of both types of driving, has also attracted great interest from researchers. In this paper, to achieve front-vehicle detection in unmanned or assisted driving, a vision-based, efficient, and fast front-vehicle detection method based on the spatial and temporal characteristics of the front vehicle is proposed. First, a method to extract the motion vector of the front vehicle is put forward based on Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) and the spatial position constraint. Then, by analyzing the differences between the motion vectors of the vehicle and those of the background, feature points of the vehicle are extracted. Finally, a feature-point clustering method based on a combination of temporal and spatial characteristics are applied to realize front-vehicle detection. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified using a large number of videos.
Keywords: clustering; front-vehicle detection; motion vector; vanishing point.