Importance

Loading Importance Indicators...

Abstract

A vehicle following apparatus with a distance measuring function is provided in which once the driver roughly sets a vehicle following window on a display screen, the exact position and size of the window can be automatically adjusted so as to locate the image of a target preceding vehicle as sensed in the center of the window, and in which the distance to the target preceding vehicle can be successively measured in an exact manner while following the target vehicle. A pair of image sensors sense an object from two different points to form a pair of first and second images thereof. A window forming means defines a vehicle-following window of a variable size within the first images. A memory successively stores an image in the vehicle-following window. An image processor finds, from the first images at a current time, a new image which is the most similar to the image stored in the memory at a previous time. The image processor defines a provisional window containing therein the thus found new image. A controller not only calculates the distance to the preceding vehicle, but also adjusts the location of the provisional window to form a new window so that the new window thus formed contains the most number of horizontal lines. To this end, using the provisional window, differences between vertically adjacent image signals within the provisional window are summed up over the horizontal length of the provisional window to extract horizontal lines in the provisional window, so that the new window is defined based on a vertical position maximimizing the sum of the differences.

Loading the Abstract Image...

First Claim