Research Topics



Estimation of the Visibility Distance by In-Vehicle Stereovision

descriptif

An atmospheric visibility measurement system capable of quantifying the most common operating range of onboard exteroceptive sensors is a key parameter in the creation of drivingassistance systems. This information is then utilized to adapt sensor operations and processing or to alert the driver that his onboard assistance system is momentarily inoperative. Moreover, a system capable of either detecting the presence of fog or estimating visibility distances constitutes in itself a driving assistance. In this paper, the authors present a technique to estimate the mobilized visibility distance through a use of onboard charge-coupled device cameras. The latter represents the distance to the most distant object on the road surface having a contrast above 5%. This definition is very close to the definition of the meteorological visibility distance proposed by the International Commission on Illumination. The method combines the computations of local contrasts above 5% and of a depth map of the vehicle environment using stereovision within 60 ms on a current-day computer. In this paper, both methods are described separately. Then, their combination is detailed. The method is operative night and day in every kind of meteorological condition and is evaluated; thanks to video sequences under sunny weather and foggy weather.

Publications
  1. Charbonnier, P., Muzet, V., Nicolle, P., Hautière, N. a. J.-P. and Aubert, D. Stereovision applied to road scene analysis. In Bulletin des Laboratoires des Ponts et Chaussées, 272: 57-74, 2008.    
  2. Hautière, N., Aubert, D. and Jourlin, M. Mesure du contraste local dans les images, application à la mesure de distance de visibilité par caméra embarquée. In Traitement du Signal, 23 (2): 145-158, 2006.    
  3. Hautière, N., Labayrade, R. and Aubert, D. Estimation of the Visibility Distance by Stereovision: a Generic Approach. In IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, E89-D (7): 2084-2091, 2006.    
  4. Hautière, N., Labayrade, R. and Aubert, D. Real-Time Disparity Contrast Combination for Onboard Estimation of the Visibility Distance. In IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 7 (2): 201-212, 2006.    
  5. Hautière, N., Labayrade, R. and Aubert, D. Estimation of the Visibility Distance by Stereovision: a Generic Approach. In IAPR Congress on Machine Vision Applications (MVA'05), Tsukuba, Japan, pages 590-593, 2005.  

Slides

descriptifMVA2005 presentation

Videos


Related topics

Physics-based Vision

Stereovision and Structure from Motion

Atmospheric visibility assessment
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