Walking aid system
AssigneeToyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorsKohei SHINTANI, Hiroaki KAWAMURA
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An image area including a traffic light in an image taken by a camera is determined, and the determined image area including the traffic light is extracted and the extracted image area is subjected to enlargement processing to determine whether a status of the traffic light is red or green, and notice to start crossing is provided to a user under a condition that the status of the traffic light switches from red to green. Consequently, even with image information from a single camera alone, accuracy in recognition of the traffic light can sufficiently be enhanced. As a result, crossing start notice can properly be provided without an increase in configuration complexity and weight of the system.
Claims6
A walking aid system that at least provides notice to start crossing to a user for the user to cross a crosswalk, the walking aid system comprising:
- an image acquisition section capable of acquiring an image including both a white line closest to the user from among white lines of the crosswalk and a traffic light located ahead of the user when the user reaches the crosswalk;
- a determination section that determines an image area including the crosswalk and an image area including the traffic light in the image acquired by the image acquisition section;
- an image processing section that extracts the image area including the traffic light, the image area being determined by the determination section, and performs enlargement processing of the extracted image area;
- a traffic light determination section that determines whether or not a status of the traffic light is a stop instruction state or a crossing permission state from information of the image area including the traffic light, the image area being subjected to the enlargement processing by the image processing section;
- a switching recognition section that recognizes switching of the status of the traffic light, the status being determined by the traffic light determination section, from the stop instruction state to the crossing permission state;
- and
- a notification section that provides notice to start crossing to the user under a condition that the status of the traffic light, the status being recognized by the switching recognition section, switches from the stop instruction state to the crossing permission state.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.