Patent ID: 8199198

Claim:
A method of detecting and classifying bright spots imaged by a forward-looking monochrome video camera in a host vehicle, comprising the steps of: scanning a region of interest in each of a succession of video image frames to detect bright spots potentially corresponding to lights of other vehicles by: (1) performing a global search within the region of interest to detect all bright spots potentially corresponding to a vehicle light, said global search being performed by identifying individual bright pixels within the region of interest and tracing contours of identified bright pixels that are contiguous; and (2) performing a local search to isolate individual bright spots within a detected bright spot that is larger than a first threshold, said local search being performed by defining a search window bounding the traced contour of such detected bright spot, identifying individual bright pixels within said search window, and tracing contours of identified bright pixels that are contiguous; evaluating bright spots detected by the global and local searches based on appearance and location in the region of interest over a series of said video image frames; and classifying the detected bright spots based on the evaluations.