A Method of Measuring Distances between Cars Using Vehicle Black Box Images

Copyright © 2014 Yangwon Lim and Hankyu Lim. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Stereo cameras that can make stereoscopic images using two cameras as with human eyes can measure distances quite accurately. Single cameras, however, have limitations in accurately measuring distances to objects. In this paper, a method of measuring distances between cars by extracting car number plates from vehicle black box images is proposed. For accurate distance measurement, distances calculated by analyzing and extracting car number plates captured in black box images were compared to actually measured distances to identify error values in order to verify the calculated distances. Through the experiments, it can be seen that the proposed method is useful in measuring vehicles ’ relative locations using black box images. The proposed method of measuring distances between cars using black box images uses lens view angle information and car number plate size information