Camera Image Dehazing and Target Detection for Autonomous Vehicles

This paper describes a simple target detection system for autonomous vehicles to perform an emergency stop. We especially focus on the system only with a digital camera as the perception unit for the situation. The detecting performance of the imaging sensors, including the digital cameras, often suffer from “haze” due to atmospheric obscuration. In this paper, we review the image “dehazing” algorithms aiming for the in-vehicle usage, and we propose a system configuration for the safety measure with applying a selected algorithm. A series of experimental results depicted the feasibility of the system configuration and its applicability to real-time processing.