Vision-Based On-Road Nighttime Vehicle Detection and Tracking Using Improved HOG Features

Abstract

The lack of discernible vehicle contour features in low-light conditions poses a formidable challenge for nighttime vehicle detection under hardware cost constraints. Addressing this issue, an enhanced histogram of oriented gradients (HOGs) approach is introduced to extract relevant vehicle features. Initially, vehicle lights are extracted using a combination of background illumination removal and a saliency model. Subsequently, these lights are integrated with a template-based approach to delineate regions containing potential vehicles. In the next step, the fusion of superpixel and HOG (S-HOG) features within these regions is performed, and the support vector machine (SVM) is employed for classification. A non-maximum suppression (NMS) method is applied to eliminate overlapping areas, incorporating the fusion of vertical histograms of symmetrical features of oriented gradients (V-HOGs). Finally, the Kalman filter is utilized for tracking candidate vehicles over time. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in the accuracy of vehicle recognition in nighttime scenarios with the proposed method.

A Lightweight Vehicle Detection Method Fusing GSConv and Coordinate Attention Mechanism

“…The single-stage detection algorithms, on the other hand, discard region selection and directly recognize the target to be detected in the image; representative algorithms include the Single-Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) [11], the You Only Look Once (YOLO) series [12][13][14], and EfficientDet [15]. In contrast to two-stage detection algorithms, single-stage detection algorithms exhibit superior real-time performance, but the detection accuracy is slightly lower [16].…”