Patent ID: 8581983

Claim:
A method for determining a classification of an object of interest relating to a vehicle, comprising the steps of: (i) with an image capture device disposed at the vehicle and having a field of view, acquiring an image; (ii) limiting the dynamic range of the acquired image to obtain a resultant image that comprises at least one region of interest, which encompasses a region of the field of view that is less than the field of view of the image capture device; (iii) processing image data representative of said at least one region of interest to extract information relating to a set of image features from the acquired resultant image while not processing image data outside of said at least one region of interest; (iv) statistically processing the extracted information with a previously determined set of image feature information values, each member of the set of image feature information values corresponding to a respective one of a set of predefined classifications of an object of interest relating to the vehicle, to determine the most probable classification; (v) outputting the determined most probable classification of an object of interest related to the vehicle; and wherein step (iii) comprises processing image data of the resultant image with a two dimensional complex discrete wavelet transform to produce a selected set of coefficients related to features in the acquired resultant image and, in step (iv), the previously determined set of image feature values comprises a set of weights for each defined classification, the weights being multiplied with the set of coefficients to produce a score for each defined classification, the defined classification with the highest produced score being the classification output in step (v).