Real-time vision-based preceding vehicle tracking and recognition

This paper proposes a preceding vehicle tracking and detection system which includes road area finding, vehicle footprint extraction, and vehicle bounding box extraction. Our method detects the footprint of the vehicle inside the road area to avoid the false detection of delineators. By extracting the preceding vehicle, we effectively track the vehicles, and detect the passing car and distant car. Then, we also propose the distance measure formula. Through camera calibration process and vanishing point detection process, we can calculate the distance to the preceding vehicle accurately.