Salient video cube guided nighttime vehicle braking event detection

In nighttime driving brake lights are particularly important because they offer a warning signal to prevent potential collisions. In this work, we propose a novel visual-based approach for nighttime brake light detection using three-dimensional Nakagami imaging to analyze tail lights of vehicles in front. Rather than heuristic features, such as symmetry of taillights and appearance of the third brake light, the proposed approach extracts invariant features by modeling the scattering of brake lights, thus allowing detection to proceed in a part-based manner. Experiments from extensive datasets show that the proposed system can effectively detect vehicle braking under different lighting and traffic conditions, making it a realistic option for real-world applications. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.