Night-time vehicle sensing in far infrared image with deep learning

Abstract

The use of night vision systems in vehicles is becoming increasingly common. Several approaches using infrared sensors have been proposed in the literature to detect vehicles in far infrared (FIR) images. However, these systems still have low vehicle detection rates and performance could be improved. This paper presents a novel method to detect vehicles using a far infrared automotive sensor. Firstly, vehicle candidates are generated using a constant threshold from the infrared frame. Contours are then generated by using a local adaptive threshold based on maximum distance, which decreases the number of processing regions for classification and reduces the false positive rate. Finally, vehicle candidates are verified using a deep belief network (DBN) based classifier. The detection rate is 93.9% which is achieved on a database of 5000 images and video streams. This result is approximately a 2.5% improvement on previously reported methods and the false detection rate is also the lowest among them.