Patent ID: 8446471

Claim:
A method for generating surrounding seamless bird-view image with distance interface, comprising the steps of: providing a plurality of surrounding images; converting the plural surrounding images so as to combine the plural converted surrounding images into a surrounding seamless bird-view image; and generating an auxiliary image containing marking aids for distance estimation in the surrounding seamless bird-view image, wherein converting the plural surrounding images comprises the steps of: performing a viewpoint transformation process upon the plural surrounding images for transforming the plural surrounding images into a plurality of corresponding bird-view images, identifying a plurality of overlapped regions from pairs of adjacent bird-view images, the overlapped regions having boundaries along lines at which the pairs of adjacent bird-view images begin to overlap, performing a weight calculation process for each overlapped region so as to obtain a plurality of overlapped images respectively corresponding to each overlapped region, and combining the plural overlapped images and the portions of the plural transformed bird-view images that are not overlapped into the surrounding seamless bird-view image, and wherein for each overlapped region, the weight calculation process comprises the steps of: measuring a first distance along a first direction between each pixel in the overlapped region and a first one of the boundaries of the overlapped region and a second distance between that pixel and a second one of the boundaries of the overlapped region, determining a first weighting value and a second weighting value for each pixel in the overlapped region according to the measured first and second distances of the respective pixel, and performing a weighted feature calculation on an image feature of each pixel in the overlapped region by use of the first weighting value and the second weighting value so as to obtain an overlapped feature for each pixel in the overlapped region.