The authors developed a visual assistance for driver to easily find approaching objects at the far distance in a blind spot monitoring system designed for use at road crossings. The assistance function is based on an optical flow technique with the effective control mechanism for early approaching object detection in a memory saving manner. By using experimental video data, the authors confirmed our method could detect approaching objects more than 3.6 seconds before the arrivals under the limited condition where the subject vehicle is stopping. This is a reasonable performance as visual assistance in most of the actual driving situations at road crossings.Moreover, the estimated scale of the hardware required by our method is very small: approximately 270K gates logic and 250K bytes memory, so that it can be realized at low cost without CPU and DRAM.
Abstract