Patent ID: 11887336
Assignee: ARGO AI, LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A method for determining a relative position of an object in a surroundings of a vehicle, the method comprising:
determining, by an electronic control unit of the vehicle, an object contour of the object from a two-dimensional (2D) camera image taken by a camera of the vehicle;
back-projecting the object contour into a three-dimensional virtual space that represents the surroundings, the back-projected object contour describing a virtual three-dimensional (3D) frustum reaching from the camera into the surroundings;
determining at least one digital object template that represents the object;
positioning the at least one digital object template at a plurality of predefined positions inside the frustum, the plurality of predefined positions being determined according to a predefined positioning rule;
forward projecting the at least one digital object template from the plurality of predefined positions onto an image plane of the camera image, each forward-projected digital object template yielding a respective 2D contour proposal;
comparing the 2D contour proposals with the object contour of the object;
selecting, based on the comparing, at least one 2D contour proposal among the 2D contour proposals that fulfills a predefined matching criterion with respect to the object contour, as a respective best-fit contour proposal; and
determining the relative position of the object based on the respective predefined position of each corresponding digital object template that leads to the at least one 2D contour proposal selected as the respective best-fit contour proposal.