A Novel Detection Method of Preceding Vehicles at Night

The method proposed in this paper was based on infrared CCD, used taillights, license plate, edge and symmetry characters to detect and locate preceding vehicle. First, the infrared image was preprocessed, and then the proposed method extracted license plate and taillights characters. If these two characters cannot be extracted, vertical edges were used to get the interest area. This detection method also figured out the vertical axis of symmetry and the width of the candidate vehicle. Some important restrictions obtained from above steps, including license plate, taillights, edges, symmetry and height-width aspect ratio were used to validate the preceding vehicle in the interest area. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective, reliable.