Independent Moving Object Detection Based on a Vehicle Mounted Binocular Camera

Accurate detection of independent moving objects is the key to ensure the safety of driverless vehicles during travelling. In this study, a moving object detection method based on a vehicle-mounted binocular camera is proposed. Firstly, a feature matching points selection strategy is designed for high accuracy camera ego-motion estimation. Then, the residual optical flow filed generated only by moving objects is estimated by taking into account the camera ego-motion and global mixed optical flow. A dynamic threshold segmentation method based on disparity is proposed to separate the moving regions from the residual optical flow field. Finally, 3D and 2D information are combined for extracting each single moving object from moving regions. The innovation of the proposed method is that it can detect any type and any size of moving object theoretically by using the dense motion information of the images. By taking the data in KITTI database as the test samples, the detection precision of the moving objects using the proposed algorithm can reach up to 91% without considering tracking strategy.