On using the hough transform for driving assistance applications

The Driving Assistance Systems (DAS) aim to help the vehicle drivers to proceed through different road situations. However, their main task is not only to safe one particular driver, but also to increase the safety for all traffic members. The problem domain here is huge and might be divided into the subtopics, like driver's fatigue detection, pedestrian tracking, obstacle collision avoidance, lane departure warnings and traffic signs detection and recognition. Advanced computer vision techniques are widely used in order to develop sufficient and robust systems for driving assistance. In this paper we discuss the video-based Hough-Transform driven objects detection algorithms and their applications for lane departure warnings, as well as for traffic signs detection. Furthermore, a high-speed hardware implementation of these algorithms on the FPGA/ASIC is also presented.