Overcoming Occlusion in the Automotive Environment—A Review

Accurate and consistent vulnerable road user detection remains one of the most challenging perception tasks for autonomous vehicles. One of the most complex outstanding issues is partial occlusion, where a sensor has only a partial view of the target object due to a foreground object that partially obscures the target. A review of occlusion detection and handling solutions for the automotive environment is presented by this research. This article first discusses object detection by the human visual system, provides an overview of occlusion reasoning in computer vision, presents a summary of occlusion handling strategies in pedestrian, vehicle and object detection applications in the automotive environment. A selection of the remaining challenges to achieving the required level of object detection performance for safe autonomous driving are also discussed.