Patent ID: 7949190

Claim:
A system for detecting and identifying vehicles in real-time at night-time, the system including: an illuminant object image segmentation device for segmenting illuminant objects from images in front of a host vehicle; an illuminant object classification device for classifying the illuminant objects segmented from the images by a connected object demarcation unit, so as to extract spatial feature of correlation between the illuminant objects as illuminant object groups; a vehicle-light object identification device for extracting spatial feature information of each vehicle from the illuminant object groups by a pattern analyzing unit; a vehicle position determining device for gaining relative position information between each target vehicle that appears ahead on the road and the host vehicle from the spatial feature information by a distance estimation unit; and a vehicle tracking device for detecting a vehicle's moving direction in accordance with a vehicle-light group targeted from the following continued image frames based on the relative position information after gaining the illuminant object groups, so as to determine a movement information of each vehicle that enters an area under surveillance; wherein the pattern analyzing unit identifies whether an illuminant object group has characteristics of vehicle lighting features in accordance with a demarcated illuminant object group based on characteristics of horizontal and vertical projection profiles of illuminant objects with horizontal alignment of illuminant objects, and then identifies the vehicle lighting features in vehicle head lamps or vehicle tail lamps.