Patent ID: 7899211

Claim:
An object detecting system for a vehicle moving along a surface, the object detecting system comprising: an imaging device disposed on the vehicle and capturing a two-dimensional image representing a scene ahead of the vehicle, the two-dimensional image having a vertical axis generally perpendicular to the surface and a horizontal axis generally parallel to the surface; and a controller receiving the image from the imaging device, the controller including: a feature extraction unit reading the image, extracting from the image edges of a feature, producing an image of pixels showing the edges of the feature, and normalizing the edges of the feature; a motion-information calculator evaluating the feature and outputting feature velocity information for each image pixel showing the normalized edges of the feature; a coordinate transformation unit reading two-dimensional position coordinates of the image pixels and outputting transformed three-dimensional position coordinates; and an object-attribute determination unit determining whether the feature is a moving object, the determining being based on the transformed three-dimensional position coordinates received from the coordinate transformation unit and on the feature velocity information received from the motion-information calculator.