Study on Vehicle Accident Avoidance System Using Kinect Depth Sensor Along with Notifications on Mobile Devices

摘要

In this paper, Kinect depth sensor, a low-cost range sensor released by Microsoft is used as vision sensor to monitor vehicle's surroundings by detecting objects in front of it and measuring how far they are from the sensor. Therefore, our monitoring system comes with computer vision techniques which imitate natural human vision system letting unmanned (robots) or manned vehicles to understand the environment around them by extracting and analyzing useful information from a single or a sequence of images taken by cameras, here Kinect camera. Several technologies have been used to deal with computer vision applications such stereovision, LIDAR and RADAR but each of them still has advantages and disadvantages in term of limitations and price. Firstly, experiments have been conducted with Kinect depth sensor by detecting the obstacles in front of the sensor and measuring the distance from them to depth sensor in accuracy way by checking if the detected object is real or not to reduce processing time ignoring pixels which are not a part of real object in such real-time applications. Results are promising and also Kinect accuracy have been tested on distance measurement function based on the location of detected object, different environments (brightness and darkness), physical measurements and system outputs. In our case, we suppose a vehicle equipped with Kinect camera as imaging sensor in order to take more precautions to avoid accident by helping the driver to be warned with simple message or an audio about some objects in front of the vehicle or get proof in case of accident that the driver didn't take care or not by saving color images and distances in web server whenever there is a warning. Also, a mobile application on android platform is developed to get notification whenever there is a warning about the presence of objects and at the same time distances and color images are recorded in web server for further analysis. Notification system can be used in many scenarios in case the driver is not the vehicle owner and also in parking area when the owner is notified in real time when other vehicle comes closer at a certain distance and can view the color image of the scene simultaneously when there is a warning.