Predict Vehicle Collision by TTC From Motion Using a Single Video Camera

The objective of this paper is the instantaneous computation of time-to-collision (TTC) for potential collision only from the motion information captured with a vehicle borne camera. The contribution is the detection of dangerous events and degree directly from motion divergence in the driving video, which is also a clue used by human drivers. Both horizontal and vertical motion divergence are analyzed simultaneously in several collision sensitive zones. The video data are condensed to the motion profiles both horizontally and vertically in the lower half of the video to show motion trajectories directly as edge traces. Stable motion traces of linear feature components are obtained through filtering in the motion profiles. As a result, this avoids object recognition and sophisticated depth sensing in prior. The fine velocity computation yields reasonable TTC accuracy so that a video camera can achieve collision avoidance alone from the size changes of visual patterns. We have tested the algorithm for various roads, environments, and traffic, and shown results by visualization in the motion profiles for overall evaluation.