VISION GUIDED BY VEHICLE DYNAMICS FOR ONBOARD ESTIMATION OF THE VISIBILITY RANGE

The presence of an area with low visibility conditions is a relevant information to communicate to drivers before they reach this area. In this aim, we develop a generic sensor of visibility using an onboard camera in a vehicle equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Our approach consists in estimating the range to the most distant object belonging to the plane of the road having at least 5% of contrast. The originality of this approach lies in the fact that the depth map of the vehicle environment is obtained by aligning the road plane in successive images. This algorithm exploits the dynamics of the vehicle which is given or observed by proprioceptive sensors. In this paper, we present the principle of our approach in terms of image processing and explain how the vehicle dynamics takes part in it with a sensitivity study.