On-road Vehicle detection based on hierarchical clustering using adaptive vehicle localization

Vehicle detection is one of the important tasks in automatic driving. It is a hard problem that many researchers focused on it. Most commercial vehicle detection systems are based on radar. But these methods have some problems such as have problem in zigzag motions. Image processing techniques can overcome these problems.This paper introduces a method based on hierarchical clustering using low-level image features for on-road vehicle detection. Each vehicle assumed as a cluster. In traditional clustering methods, the threshold distance for each cluster is fixed, but in this paper, the adaptive threshold varies according to the position of each cluster. The threshold measure is computed with bivariate normal distribution. Sampling and teammate selection for each cluster is applied by the members-based weighted average. For this purpose, unlike other methods that use only horizontal or vertical lines, a fully edge detection algorithm was utilized. Corner is an important feature of video images that commonly were used in vehicle detection systems. In this paper, Harris features are applied to detect the corners. LISA data set is used to evaluate the proposed method. Several experiments are applied to investigate the performance of proposed algorithm. Experimental results show good performance compared to other algorithms.