Distance estimation of vehicle headlights

Abstract

A method for determining the distance to a vehicle for use in an AHC-System includes capturing a raw image by using a camera of an AHC-System at nighttime; determining by the AHC-System that the raw image includes a headlight of a vehicle; extracting by the AHC-System an image segment of the raw image including the headlight of a vehicle; refining the image segment by applying a classifier, such as to generate a refined image including the headlight of a vehicle; building a feature vector based on the refined image; and estimating the distance to the vehicle based on the feature vector. The present invention also relates to an image processing system adapted to perform the above method.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.