Estimating Relative Vehicle Motions in Traffic Scenes

Autonomous operation of a vehicle on a road calls for understanding of various events involving the motions of the vehicles in its vicinity. In this paper we show how a moving vehicle which is carrying a camera can estimate the relative motions of nearby vehicles. We present a model for the motion of the observing vehicle, and show how to 'stabilize' it, i.e. to correct the image sequence so that transient motions resulting from bumps, etc. are removed and the sequence corresponds more closely to the sequence that would have been collected if the motion had been smooth. We also model the motions of nearby vehicles and show how to detect their motions relative to the observing vehicle. We present results for several road image sequences which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.