DepthFinder, a real-time depth detection system for aided driving

Abstract

Many military applications require the distance information from a moving vehicle to targets from video image sequences. For indirect driving, lack of perception of depth in view hinders steering and navigation. In this paper we present a real-time depth detection system DepthFinder, a system that finds the distances of objects through a monocular vision model. DepthFinder can be used with a camera mounted either at the front of side of a moving vehicle. A real-time matching algorithm is introduced to improve the matching performance by several orders of magnitude. The experiment results and the performance analysis are presented.