Robust visual detection of brake-lights in front for commercialized dashboard camera

The collision avoidance system (CAS) is an essential system for safe driving that alerts the driver or automatically applies the brakes in an expected situation of a vehicle collision. To realize this, an autonomous system that can quickly and precisely detect brake-lights of preceding vehicle is essential and this should works well in various environments for safety reason. Our proposed vision algorithm solves these objectives focusing on simple color features rather than a learning algorithm with a high computational cost, since our target system is a real-time embedded device, i.e., forward-facing dashboard camera. However, the existing feature-based algorithms are vulnerable to the ambient noise (noise problem), and cannot be flexibly applied to various environments (applicability problem). Therefore, our method is divided into two stages: rear-lights region detection using gamma correction for noise problem, and brake-lights detection using HSV color space for applicability problem, respectively. (i) Rear-lights region detection: we confirm the presence of the vehicle in front and derive the rear-lights region, and used non-linear mapping of gamma correction to make the detected region robust to noise. (ii) Brake-lights detection: from the detected rear-lights region, we extract color features using the HSV color range so that we can classify brake on and off in various conditions. Experimental results show that our algorithm overcomes the noise problem and applicability problem in various environments.