Vehicle detection under various lighting conditions by incorporating particle filter

We propose an automatic system to detect preceding vehicles on the highway under various lighting and different weather conditions based on the computer vision technologies. To adapt to different characteristics of vehicle appearance at daytime and nighttime, four cues including underneath, vertical edge, symmetry and taillight are fused for the preceding vehicle detection. By using Particle Filter with four cues through the processes including initial sampling, propagation, observation and cue fusion and evaluation, particle filter accurately generates the vehicle distribution. Thus, the proposed system can successfully detect and track preceding vehicles and be robust to different lighting conditions. Unlike normal particle filter focuses on a single target distribution in a discrete state space, we detect multiple vehicles with particle filter through a high-level tracking strategy using clustering technique called basic sequential algorithmic scheme (BSAS). Finally, experimental results for several videos from different scenes are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system.