• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.609-620
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• 2016

Recently, there are active studies on a forward collision warning system to prevent the accidents and improve convenience of drivers. For collision evasion, the vehicle detection system is required. In general, existing learning-based vehicle detection methods use the entire appearance of the vehicles from rear-view images, so that each vehicle types should be learned separately since they have distinct rear-view appearance regarding the types. To overcome such shortcoming, we learn Haar-like features from the lower part of the vehicles which contain tail lights to detect vehicles leveraging the fact that the lower part is consistent regardless of vehicle types. As a verification procedure, we detect tail lights to distinguish actual vehicles and non-vehicles. If candidates are too small to detect the tail lights, we use HOG(Histogram Of Gradient) feature and SVM(Support Vector Machine) classifier to reduce false alarms. The proposed forward vehicle detection method shows accuracy of 95% even in the complicated images with many buildings by the road, regardless of vehicle types.