Real-Time Downward View Generation of a Vehicle Using Around View Monitor System

Abstract

In this paper, a method to generate the downward image of current vehicle location using a commercial around view monitor (AVM) is proposed. The proposed system consists of three stages, namely feature tracking, obstacle filtering, and downward view generation. In the feature tracking stage, the Shi–Tomasi corner detection is used and feature tracking is performed with a Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi (KLT) tracker to determine the transformation between AVM images. In the obstacle filtering stage, features on obstacles are filtered by using the difference in a tracking distance between features detected on the ground and features detected on the obstacle. This is performed by using a histogram based on the tracking distance of features. Finally, in the downward view generation stage, transformation between the current AVM image and the previous AVM image is obtained by using the tracked feature pair refined via the aforementioned steps. Specifically, the random sample consensus (RANSAC) method is used to obtain transformations from which the influence of outliers is removed. The downward image of the current vehicle is generated by the obtained transformation and is synthesized to the existing AVM image. The results indicate that the proposed system synthesizes the existing AVM image and the generated downward image of a vehicle in a seamless way by determining the exact pair of matching points between current and the previous AVM images. We believe the proposed system can be utilized in efficient wireless charging system and safe driving system.