Vehicle detection in severe weather based on pseudo-visual search and HOG–LBP feature fusion

Vehicle detection in severe weather has always been a difficult task in the environmental perception of intelligent vehicles. This paper proposes a vehicle detection method based on pseudo-visual search and the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)–local binary pattern (LBP) feature fusion. Using radar detection information, this method can directly extract the region of interest (ROI) of vehicles from infrared images by imitating human vision. Unlike traditional methods, the pseudo-visual search mechanism is independent of complex image processing and environmental interferences, thereby significantly improving the speed and accuracy of ROI extraction. More notably, the ROI extraction process based on pseudo-visual search can reduce image processing by 40%–80%, with an ROI extraction time of only 4 ms, which is far lower than the traditional algorithms. In addition, we used the HOG–LBP fusion feature to train the vehicle classifier, which improves the extraction ability of local and global features of vehicles. The HOG–LBP fusion feature can improve vehicle detection accuracy by 6%–9%, compared to a single feature. Experimental results show that the accuracy of vehicle detection is 92.7%, and the detection speed is 31 fps, which validates the feasibility of the proposed method and effectively improve the vehicle detection performance in severe weather