In this paper a novel spline-based multi-lane detection and tracking system is proposed. Reliable lane detection and tracking is an important component of lane departure warning systems, lane keeping support systems or lane change assistance systems. The major novelty of the proposed approach is the usage of the so-called Catmull-Rom spline in combination with the extended Kalman filter tracking. The new spline-based model enables an accurate and flexible modeling of the lane markings. At the same time the application of the extended Kalman filter contributes significantly to the system robustness and stability. There is no assumption about the parallelism or the shapes of the lane markings in our method. The number of lane markings is also not restrained, instead each lane marking is separately modeled and tracked. The system runs on a standard PC in real time (i.e. 30 fps) with WVGA image resolution (752 × 480).The test vehicle has been driven on the roads with challenging scenarios, like worn out lane markings, construction sites, narrow corners, exits and entries of the highways, etc., and good performance has been demonstrated. The quantitative evaluation has been performed using manually annotated video sequences.

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This paper presents a thorough introduction to the real time video surveillance system which has been developed at Bosch Corporate Research considering robustness as the major design goal. A robust surveillance system should especially aim for a low number offalse positives since surveillance guards might get distracted by too many alarms caused by, e.g., moving trees, rain, small camera motion, or varying illumination conditions. Since a missed security related event could cause a serious threat for an installation site, the before mentioned criterion is obviously not suf cient for designing a robust system and thus a low number offalse negatives should simultaneously be achieved. Due to the fact that the false negative rate should ideally be equal to zero, the surveillance system should be able to cope with varying illumination conditions, low contrast and occlusion situations. Besides presenting the building blocks of our video surveillance system, the measures taken to achieve robustness will be illustrated in this paper Since our system is based on algorithms for video motion detection, which has been described e.g. in [1], the previous set of algorithms had to be extended to feature a complete video content analysis system. This transition from simple motion detection to video content analysis is also discussed in the following. In order to measure the performance of our system, quality measures calculated for various PETS sequences will be presented.

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In recent years, there was much activity in the development of camera based active safety systems to aid and to support the driver of a car. One application for such a system is the detection and classification of traffic signs. An important aspect of such a system is the tracking of traffic signs. We present a novel algorithm to track traffic signs in 3D using a single monochrome camera. The algorithm allows to use the constraint that the observed movement on the image plane is entirely caused by the host car movement, which is partially known from internal sensors. The usage of the sensor information improves the tracking process and allows a robust rejection of false positive detections. We also present a way to incorporate a shape cue directly from the image plane into the tracking process. First tests show good results in practice and indicate, that this kind of tracking makes a very valuable addition to a traffic sign detection system.

Intelligent Driver Assistance Systems, such as Lane Departure Warning, extract 3D information of the road geometry from a camera. Therefore, the transformation between the image and the ground plane has to be determined with a very high accuracy. Conventional calibration methods are usually a compromise between the accuracy and a preferably small effort for the calibration set-up. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust method for an accurate estimation of the extrinsic parameters based on minimizing an error function. The idea is to avoid the difficult and timeconsuming measurement of marker positions in the 3D world coordinate system which is fixed with respect to the vehicle. A pattern of circles is placed on the ground plane in front of the car. For our approach, it is only necessary to measure the relative distances between the centers of the circles to each other. A nonlinear-optimization algorithm minimizes the squared difference between the distances of the backprojected circles segmented in the images on the ground plane and of the measurement in the real world.

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