We propose an estimation method of pedestrian detectability considering the driver's visual adaptation to drastic illumination change, which has not been studied in previous works. We assume that driver's visual characteristics change in proportion to the elapsed time after illumination change. In this paper, as a solution, we construct multiple estimators corresponding to different elapsed periods, and estimate the detectability by switching them according to the elapsed period. To evaluate the proposed method, we construct an experimental setup to present a participant with illumination changes and conduct a preliminary simulated experiment to measure and estimate the pedestrian detectability according to the elapsed period. Results show that the proposed method can actually estimate the detectability accurately after a drastic illumination change.

This paper proposes a method of accurately detecting the boundary of narrow stripes, such as lane markings, by employing gradient cues of edge points. Using gradient direction cues, the edge points at the two sides of the boundary of stripes are classified into two groups before the Hough transform is applied to extract the boundary lines. The experiments show that the proposed method improves significantly the performance in terms of the accuracy of boundary detection of narrow stripes over the conventional approaches without edge point grouping.

An atmospheric visibility measurement system capable of quantifying the most common operating range of onboard exteroceptive sensors is a key parameter in the creation of driving assistance systems. This information is then utilized to adapt sensor operations and processing or to alert the driver that the onboard assistance system is momentarily inoperative. Moreover, a system capable of either detecting the presence of fog or estimating visibility distances constitutes in itself a driving aid. In this paper, we first present a review of different optical sensors likely to measure the visibility distance. We then present our stereovision based technique to estimate what we call the "mobilized visibility distance". This is the distance to the most distant object on the road surface having a contrast above 5%. In fact, this definition is very close to the definition of the meteorological visibility distance proposed by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). The method combines the computation of both a depth map of the vehicle environment using the "v-disparity" approach and of local contrasts above 5%. Both methods are described separately. Then, their combination is detailed. A qualitative evaluation is done using different video sequences. Finally, a static quantitative evaluation is also performed thanks to reference targets installed on a dedicated test site.