Patent ID: 7660434
Filing Date: 2010-02-09
Classification: B60W,G06K,G06T

Abstract:
1. An apparatus to detect an object on a road surface, the apparatus comprising: a plurality of cameras each capturing an image; an image memory to store a plurality of images captured by the cameras, respectively; a dividing unit configured to divide a target image captured by one camera of the plurality of cameras into a plurality of stripe regions; a correspondence computing unit configured to compute a correspondence between the target image and a reference image captured by another camera of the plurality of cameras for each of the stripe regions based on the plurality of stripe regions, when receiving a boundary line function representing a boundary between a road area and an obstacle area in the target image; an image matching score computing unit configured to compute a matching score between a whole of the target image or a part thereof and a corresponding region of the reference image for each of the stripe regions based on the correspondence obtained by the correspondence computing unit; and a boundary line function optimization unit configured to generate an optimum boundary line function maximizing the correspondence with respect to the whole of the target image or the part thereof; wherein the image matching score computing unit comprises: a road surface image transformation unit configured to generate a road surface transformed image of the reference image wherein a pattern of the road region of the reference image matches with a pattern of the road region of the target image, and an obstacle image transformation unit configured to generate a transformed image of the reference image wherein a reference image pattern of an obstacle standing on the road surface matches with a target image pattern, and wherein when receiving a target region image representing the whole of the target image or the part thereof and a boundary line between the obstacle included in the target region image and the road surface, the matching score computing unit computes a matching score between a road surface region below a grounding line in the target region image and a road surface transformed image obtained by transforming the reference image with the road surface image transformation unit, and computes a matching score between an obstacle region above the grounding line in the target image and the obstacle surface transformed image obtained by transforming a reference image with the obstacle image transformation unit.