Recently

vision sensor based vehicle detection becomes an attractive research area for the driver assistance system (DAS). But most research was carried out in the day time with a good lighting condition and what little research so far done in the night time assumed no interference of light. Hence a headlights based vehicle detection algorithm at nighttime environment is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm detects the rear vehicles via real-time image sequence capture Firstly

bright objects are extracted from the nighttime road scene images Then the extracted bright objects are verified based on rules to eliminate the interferential light sources and obtain the actual vehicle headlights Finally

a knowledge-based method is used to cluster vehicle headlights The clustered headlights are then validated Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility

effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm on vehicle detection at night