Fast obstacle detection for urban traffic situations

The early recognition of potentially harmful traffic situations is an important goal of vision based driver assistance systems. Pedestrians, in particular children, are highly endangered in inner city traffic. Within the DaimlerChrysler UTA (Urban Traffic Assistance) project, we are using stereo vision and motion analysis in order to manage those situations. The flow/depth constraint combines both methods in an elegant way and leads to a robust and powerful detection scheme. A ball bouncing on the road often implies a child crossing the street. Since balls appear very small in the images of our cameras and can move considerably fast, a special algorithm has been developed to achieve maximum recognition reliability.