Patent ID: 7769513

Claim:
An arrangement for obtaining information about objects in an exterior environment around a vehicle, comprising: at least one optical imager that obtains images of the environment; and a processor coupled to said at least one imager and that obtains information about an object in one or more images obtained by said at least one imager, said processor being arranged to process the obtained images to determine edges of objects in the images and input data about the edges into a trained pattern recognition algorithm that has been trained to provide information about the object as output, wherein the pattern recognition algorithm is trained by: arranging a known object in a field of view of said at least one optical imager, obtaining images of the object, applying an edge detection algorithm to the obtained images to obtain data about the edges of the object in the images and associating the data with information about the object; then changing the position of the object, obtaining additional images, applying an edge detection algorithm to the additional images to obtain data about the edges of the object in the additional images and associating the data with the information about the object; then changing the object to another known object, obtaining images of the new object, applying an edge detection algorithm to the new images to obtain data about the edges of the new object in the images and associating the data with information about the new object; then changing the position of the new object, obtaining additional images, applying an edge detection algorithm to the images to obtain data about the edges of the new object in the additional images and associating the data with the information about the new object; then repeating the process of changing the object or its position until sets of data about objects in images is obtained; and inputting the data to a pattern recognition algorithm training program to obtain the trained pattern recognition algorithm which will receive data about edges of unknown objects in images and provide as output, information about the objects.