Advanced Pedestrian Distance Estimation for ADAS with Canny Edge Detection and Stereo Vision

Abstract

Pedestrian detection is a vital aspect of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), crucial for ensuring driving safety and minimizing collision risks. While detecting pedestrians is important, it must be paired with precise distance estimation to create a robust safety solution. Stereovision cameras are well-regarded for their effectiveness and affordability in measuring depth through disparity between two images. Despite this, research on pedestrian distance estimation using only stereovision remains sparse, with many studies relying on computationally heavy dense depth maps. This paper proposes an innovative method for computing object-level disparity specifically for pedestrian detection using stereo cameras. The approach integrates Canny edge detection with ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF) feature matching to efficiently identify and track keypoints within pedestrian bounding boxes. This method not only improves the accuracy of distance estimation but also reduces computational demands, making it suitable for real-time applications. The approach was thoroughly tested on a Raspberry Pi 4, a resource-constrained device, and achieved promising results, demonstrating its potential for practical use in ADAS.