Real-time vehicle tracking for driving assistance

Detecting car taillights at night is a task which can nowadays be accomplished very fast on cheap hardware. We rely on such detections to build a vision-based system that, coupling them in a rule-based fashion, is able to detect and track vehicles. This allows the generation of an interface that informs a driver of the relative distance and velocity of other vehicles in real time and triggers a warning when a potentially dangerous situation arises. We demonstrate the system using sequences shot using a camera mounted behind a car’s windshield.