120
1, JANUARY 1, 2016
Daytime Preceding Vehicle Brake Light Detection
Using Monocular Vision
Hua-Tsung Chen, Member, IEEE, Yi-Chien Wu, and Chun-Chieh Hsu, Student Member, IEEE
Abstract— Advanced vehicle safety is a recently emerging
issue appealed from the explosive population of car owners.
Increasing driver assistance systems have been developed for
warning drivers of potential hazards by analyzing the surround-
ings with sensors and/or cameras. Issuing vehicle deceleration
and potential collision, brake lights are particularly important
warning signals, allowing of no neglect. In this paper, we propose
a vision-based daytime brake light detection system using a
driving video recorder, which tends to be widespread used.
At daytime, visual features, motions, and appearances of vehicles
are highly visible. However, brake lights, on the contrary, are
hard to notice due to low contrast between the brakes lights
and environments. Without the significant characteristic of light
scattering as at night, the proposed system extracts preceding
vehicles with taillight symmetry verification, and then integrates
both luminance and radial symmetry features to detect brake
lights. A detection refinement process using temporal information
is also employed for miss recovery. Experiments are conducted on
a test data set collected by front-mounted driving video recorders,
and the results verify that the proposed system can effectively
detect brake lights at daytime, showing its good feasibility in
real-world environments.
Index Terms— Brake signal detection, vehicle detection, signal
processing, collision avoidance, driver assistance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A DVANCED vehicle safety is always a critical issue
that ordinary people are fervently concerned about
and numerous researchers are devoted to. With the explo-
sive growth in car ownership worldwide, increasing drivers
desiderate, more keenly than ever, all sorts of automatic/
semi-automatic vehicle-mounted systems for driver assistance.
For accident prevention and safety promotion, most driver
assistance systems are designed to call the driver’s attention to
potential dangers, since distracting driving is one of the main
causes of traffic accidents.
In related works, lots of research efforts are directed
towards the detection of lane markings [1]–[3] (to cite a few),
Manuscript received June 27, 2015; revised September 4, 2015; accepted
September 5, 2015. Date of publication September 9, 2015; date of current
version December 10, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Ministry
of Education, Taiwan, under Grant ATU-103-W958 and Grant ICTL-103-
Q528, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under
Grant 101-2221-E-009-087-MY3, Grant 102-2221-E-009-031, and
Grant 103-2221-E-009-154. The associate editor coordinating the review of
this paper and approving it for publication was Prof. Aime Lay-Ekuakille.
H.-T. Chen is with the Information and Communications Technology
Laboratory, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan (e-mail:
huatsung@cs.nctu.edu.tw).
Y.-C. Wu and C.-C. Hsu are with the Department of Computer
Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan (e-mail:
b303479@gmail.com; cchsu.cs00g@nctu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2015.2477412
1530-437X © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO.
traffic lights [4]–[8], vehicles [9]–[14], and vehicle lights
(taillights, brake lights, and turn signals) [15]–[24]. For the
ultimate goal of accident prevention, pre-collision sensing has
become a hot research topic among automotive manufacturers.
Over the last decades, many existing state-of-the-art systems
rely on active sensors, e.g., radars [25], or beamforming tech-
niques [26]–[28]. However, the rapid development and reduced
cost of digital cameras have made it feasible to deploy driving
video recorders (DVRs), which tend to be worldwide used.
Moreover, due to the exponential growth in computing power
and the availability of advanced computer vision techniques,
various vision-based sensing can be conducted with low-cost
algorithms. Compared to device-based sensing, vision-based
approaches have the main advantage that different tasks can
achieved merely by means of software operating on existing
hardware, requiring no additional devices.
Visual features, motion, and appearance are commonly
employed in vehicle detection. For a more thorough discussion
of vehicle detection techniques, please refer to the extensive
review by Sun et al. [12]. There are also a significant number
of approaches which utilize taillights as a cue for preced-
ing vehicle detection, especially at night, wherein the other
features are hard to detect. O’Malley et al. [15] propose an
image processing system to detect and track vehicle rear-lamp
pairs in forward-facing color videos. A camera-configuration
process is suggested to optimize the appearance of rear lamps
for segmentation. To segment rear-facing lamps from low-
exposure forward-facing color videos, the HSV color space
is used, and a red-color threshold is directly derived from
automotive regulations and adapted for real-world conditions.
Finally, lamps are paired by color cross-correlation symmetry
analysis and tracked by Kalman filtering. Considering the
“blooming effect,” caused by the saturation of bright pixels
in CCD cameras with low dynamic range, Skodras et al. [16]
exploit the color and radial symmetry information for taillight
segmentation and detect vehicles by finding taillight pairs.
A video frame is first converted into the L∗ a∗ b∗ color space.
Then, fast radial symmetry transform (FRST) [29] is applied
to the subspace image of the a∗ component for finding candi-
date taillight regions. Through a morphological light pairing
scheme and a symmetry check process, vehicle presence is
verified on the basis of heuristically thresholding.
Signaling vehicle deceleration and potential
collision, brake lights are of particular importance.
Thammakaroon and Tangamchit [17] present a nighttime
brake light detection technique for predictive brake warning.
To locate the brake lights, the red color of the rings is first
detected using the RGB color model. The color distribution
CHEN et al.: DAYTIME PRECEDING VEHICLE BRAKE LIGHT DETECTION USING MONOCULAR VISION
of brake lights is calculated from 50 collected samples
to determine the threshold for each color channel. Then,
three candidate ROIs from RGB channels are verified by
computing the intersection, and the intersected ROIs are
regarded as brake lights. Finally, a collision risk index is
computed by considering the vehicle velocity, the area of
the largest detected brake light region, and the area sum
of all detected brake light regions. Schamm et al. [18]
present a system capable of detecting vehicles at night or
during dusk based on their front and rear lights. The system
employs a perspective blob filter, which is a two-dimensional
Gaussian filter, to detect circular light blobs, and consequently
searches for corresponding light pairs using a rule-based
clustering approach. To verify each light pair association,
a symmetrical analysis is applied. Using a color-based
comparison, the system is able to discriminate between front
lights of oncoming vehicles and rear lights of preceding
vehicles. For a preceding vehicle, its braking maneuver can
be recognized by the detection of the third brake light.
Chen and Peng [19] and Chen et al. [20] and [21] put
forward several visual-based approaches on the detection of
brake lights and turn signals at night using a front-mounted
camera. In [19], Chen and Peng propose a nighttime brake
light detection approach by analyzing the signal in both spatial
and frequency domain. They first detect candidate regions in
spatial domain using color features obtained in the YCbCr
color space. Then the Cr component of the scattering areas
of candidate regions is transformed to frequency domain for
further verification. Finally, a decision making is conducted for
determining the braking status. Utilizing the characteristic of
the scattering in the brake light region, Chen et al. [20] model
brake light scattering by Nakagami imaging and conduct
the detection process in a part-based manner. The detec-
tion algorithm consists of the following steps: (i) intensity
computation and contrast enhancement with a step function;
(ii) taillight region modelling by Nakagami-m distribution,
and (iii) adaptive decision making for brake light detection.
Later on, Chen et al. further adapt this scattering model-
ing scheme for nighttime turn signal detection in [21], and
also demonstrate good feasibility in real-world environments.
However, the light scattering effect becomes inconspicuous
under a high ambient light condition and thus is not applicable
to daytime brake light detection.
Based on the tracking of vehicle taillights,
Almagambetov et al. [22], which is an enhanced version
of [23], propose a scheme for detecting brake lights and turn
signals at both daytime and nighttime. To extract candidate
taillight pairs, the regions with a blend of red and white
are first detected, and then a symmetry test is conducted
that two regions are considered symmetrical if their vertical
distance is less than the height of one region. A correlation
coefficient using RGB color information is computed for each
candidate pair and the pairs with low correlation coefficients
are eliminated. Applying Kalman filter-based tracking with
a codebook scheme to the candidate taillight pairs, the
luminance changes of tracked taillights are thus detected
as brake or turn signals. Although a near 100% detection
rate is claimed in [22], their experiments on four short
121
test video clips (totally 1609 frames in length) containing
only six signal events (two turn signals and four brake
lights) seem insufficient to demonstrate the effectiveness of
the approach. On the other hand, this approach also has
some disadvantages. First, this approach highly relies on the
tracking of taillights. Once the tracking fails, the error will
be propagated to subsequent computations that the turn/brake
signal detection process will no longer work. Besides, the
luminance change will not be as evident as claimed in [22]
under a high luminance condition. Moreover, the method
also confronts the inability of handling sudden changes of
environment light.
There have been considerable researches on vehicle
collision avoidance. However, to the best of our knowledge,
few works have focused on detecting vehicle brake lights at
daytime. In this paper, we propose a vision-based system
for daytime brake light detection. At daytime, most visual
features, motions, and appearances of vehicles are highly
visible, but the brake lights, on the contrary, are hard to notice
due to the low contrast between the brakes lights and the
environments. Besides, the light scattering effect is not as
obvious as it is at night, making brake lights more difficult to
be noticed. To call the driver’s attention to a braking vehicle
in front, daytime brake light detection is of vital importance.
Without the significant characteristic of light scattering, we
propose a hierarchical scheme which first extracts preceding
vehicles with taillight symmetry verification, and then inte-
grates both luminance and radial symmetry features to detect
brake lights. For miss recovery, a detection refinement process
using temporal information is also employed.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II elaborates the detailed processing steps of the
proposed brake light detection, including vehicle candidate
detection, taillight extraction and pairing, potential brake light
detection, and brake light status determination. Section III
explains how to perform detection refinement using temporal
information. Section IV presents and discusses the experimen-
tal results, and finally Section V concludes this paper.
II. D ETECTION OF B RAKE L IGHTS
Unlike at night, wherein the scattering effect makes
taillights and brake lights highly visible, in the daytime brake
signals become inconspicuous and easy to be neglected due
to high ambient light. Direct detection of brake lights, which
is viable at night, may be infeasible for the daytime condition
due to many false candidates with visual features similar to
the true brake lights. Hence, we propose a hierarchical scheme
for daytime brake light detection, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
In Section II-A, we first extract the preceding vehicles in
video frames. In Section II-B, we perform taillight extraction
and pairing. Within the obtained taillight regions, we detect
radially symmetric blobs (RSBs) as potential brake lights
in Section II-C. Finally, brake light status determination is
conducted in Section II-D. For better understanding, Fig. 2
gives an illustration in advance, wherein the cyan rectangle is
a preset region of interest (ROI), the purple rectangle indicates
a detected preceding vehicle, the green rectangles are the
extracted and paired taillight regions, and the small regions
122
Fig. 1. Schematic flowchart of the proposed daytime brake light detection
scheme.
Fig. 2. Illustration for the ROI, detected vehicle region, taillight regions, and
brake lights.
of high luminance inside are the brake lights we aim to
detect.
A. Vehicle Candidate Detection
For collision avoidance, the proposed brake light detection
system mainly puts emphasis on the vehicle(s) directly in front
of the camera. Therefore, we narrow down the processing
area by presetting a ROI to the centered half area of the
lower part of a frame, as shown in Fig. 2. The subsequent
vehicle extraction and brake light detection are conducted
within the ROI, and the vehicles aside will be ignored. This not
only saves much processing time but also avoids unnecessary
disturbance, for the driver, of the brake lights detected from
vehicles aside.
Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), which is a feature
descriptor firstly proposed by Dalal and Triggs [31] for human
detection, has been widely adopted in many object detection
works, showing very good effectiveness. The detection is
based on evaluating well-normalized local histograms of image
gradient orientation in a dense grid of overlapping blocks, and
a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based approach is
adopted for object/non-object classification. It is also verified
that HOG descriptors can reduce the influence of illumination
changes or shadowing. Later on, Zhu et al. [32] improve
the method [31] by selecting features from a large set of
blocks at multiple sizes, locations, and aspect ratios using
AdaBoost. A rejection cascade scheme is exploited to speed
up the detection process. Due to the effectiveness in object
detection and robustness to illumination changes, in this paper
we adopt a cascade of boosted classifiers with HOG features
to locate vehicle candidates in video frames.
B. Taillight Extraction and Pairing
In video frames, taillights are displayed in high red chro-
maticity. Therefore, L∗ a∗ b∗ is a suitable color space for
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2016
Fig. 3. Taillight extraction. (a) Image of a detected vehicle candidate. (b) The
a∗ component image of (a). (c) Binarization of (b). (d) Taillight candidates
obtained after morphological operations and connected component analysis.
Fig. 4. Y-distance test.
taillight extraction. Being a perceptually uniform color space,
L∗ a∗ b∗ equally maps the perceived color difference into
qualitative distance in the color space. Separating lightness
information (L∗ component) from color information (a∗ and
b∗ components), L∗ a∗ b∗ color space also has the advantage
that illumination changes have little effect on color infor-
mation. In our system, the a∗ component (red - green) of
L∗ a∗ b∗ is utilized to search red areas in the region of each
detected vehicle candidate. We segment each detected vehicle
candidate and compute its a∗ component image, as shown
in Figs. 3(a) and (b). The high red chromaticity regions
can be retained after image binarization with a threshold τa ,
as shown Fig. 3(c). Then, morphological operations and con-
nected component analysis are applied to eliminate noises
and obtain complete regions of taillight candidates, as shown
in Fig. 3(d).
There may be more than two taillight candidates detected
in a vehicle region. For taillight verification and pairing, we
design the following test and selection procedures based on the
characteristic of taillight symmetry to verify whether two given
candidates, termed Ci and C j , are the taillight pair of a vehicle.
1) Y-Distance Test: Let h i and h j denote the heights
of Ci and C j , respectively, as illustrated in Fig. 4. Assuming
the road surface is even, the taillight pair should be at
nearly the same horizontal. Thus, if the vertical distance d
between the centers of Ci and C j is greater than both
h i and h j , the two candidates Ci and C j should not be paired.
Inspired from [22], this Y-distance test Tyd (Ci , C j ), which
returns whether the pair (Ci , C j ) should be retained or not,
can be formulated as

0, if d > h i and d > h j ,
Tyd (Ci , C j ) = (1)
1, otherwise.
2) Size-Shape Test: Considering that a pair of taillights
should be of similar size and shape, we compute the area
ratio G of the intersection of Ci and C j to their union for
CHEN et al.: DAYTIME PRECEDING VEHICLE BRAKE LIGHT DETECTION USING MONOCULAR VISION 123

Fig. 6. Example of taillight pairing. (a) Detected vehicle region. (b) Candidate
Fig. 5. Size-shape test. pairs.

size-shape similarity evaluation, formulated as

 
Ci ∩ C j 
G=  . (2)
Ci ∪ C j 

As shown in Fig. 5, if Ci and C j are of similar size and

shape, a high G value will be obtained; otherwise, G will be
low. Thus, the pair (Ci , C j ) with a low G value should be
filtered out. This size-shape test can be formulated as
 Fig. 7. Vehicle images with (a) activated brake lights and (b) inactivated
0, if G < τs , brake lights.
Tss (Ci , C j ) = (3)
1, otherwise.
3) Pair Selection: Through the above tests, if no taillight
pair is retained, this detected vehicle candidate can be regarded
as a false detection, and no subsequent brake signal detection
needs to be conducted on it. Otherwise, we have to select
and verify the most appropriate pair from the retained taillight
pair(s). Since the taillights are usually the largest regions in
high red chromaticity at the rear of a vehicle, we define a
criterion H , which computes the area proportion of Ci and C j
to all candidates (C1 , C2 , . . . , C N ) in the detected vehicle
region, as Fig. 8. Flowchart of potential brake light detection.
 
Ci  + C j 
H= , (4)
C1  + C2  + ... + C N 
To overcome this problem, some other characteristic(s), in
where N indicates the number of all taillight candidates in the addition to luminance, should be taken into account. Consider
vehicle region. A higher H value indicates that Ci and C j are the fact that although there is no regulation on the shape of
more likely to be the taillight pair. Taking both the shape- brake lights, they generally follow a symmetric pattern. Thus,
size and area-proportion characteristics into consideration, inspired by [16], we detect radially symmetric blobs (RSBs)
we define a paring score P as in the taillight regions as potential brake lights.
We first compare vehicle images with activated and inac-
P = ρG + (1 − ρ)H, (5)
tivated brake lights, as shown in Fig. 7. Two phenomenons
where ρ is a weighting parameter ranging from 0 to 1. can be observed when a brake light is activated: (i) the
To regard both characteristics as equally important, we set color of the brake light region becomes far from the original
ρ = 0.5 in our experiments. Finally, the pair with the red in a video frame due to its very high luminance, and
highest pairing score Pmax is selected, and is verified as the (ii) brake lights appear as bright spots with a red halo around
taillight pair of the detected vehicle if Pmax is greater than 1; due to the “blooming effect.” Based on these characteristics,
otherwise, it is concluded that the vehicle candidate contains a novel scheme for potential brake light detection is proposed,
no verified taillight pair and is a false detection to be discarded. as illustrated in Fig. 8. First, the a∗ component image Ia
For example, the detected vehicle region in Fig. 6(a) have of each taillight region R is extracted. Prior to the scan of
two candidate pairs passing the aforementioned tests, as shown symmetry shapes, a simple step function S(u) is first applied
in Fig. 6(b). With a higher pairing score, the upper pair is to the a∗ component image Ia in order to retain only the pixels
selected and verified as the taillight pair of the vehicle. in high red chromaticity, as defined by

1, if u ≥ τa ,
C. Potential Brake Light Detection S(u) = (6)
0, otherwise.
In the daytime, it is very challenging to recognize whether
Using (6), the a∗ component image Ia is filtered by
the brake light is activated or not merely by luminance features
due to the high ambient light and frequent light changes. Is = Ia × S(Ia ). (7)
124
Fig. 9. Examples of radially symmetric blob detection. (a), (b) Detected
vehicle image. (c), (d) Is : the a∗ component image Ia filtered by a step
function. (e), (f) Pseudo color presentation of I f : the results of FRST.
(g), (h) Io : the binary image obtained by applying Otsu’s thresholding to I f .
(i), (j) Ib : result of potential brake light selection.
Then, we apply the fast radial symmetry trans-
form (FRST) [29] to search for symmetrical shapes in Is .
Since an activated brake light is usually in a color close to
white, leading to lower a∗ values of the corresponding pixels
than a nonbrake light, we consider only the negative-affected
pixels1 in the FRST. For noise tolerance and miss avoidance,
a low radial-strictness parameter α = 2 is used in our system.
The symmetry detection scans for shapes over a range of sizes
(from rmin to rmax ). Normally, in order to detect symmetric
shapes of any size, a large range of sizes should be used,
which, however, requires high computational cost. Thus, a
reasonable range of rmin = 1 and rmax = 5, which can cover
possible brake light sizes, is used in our system. Finally, the
result of FRST, termed I f , is converted into a binary image Io
by adopting the efficient Otsu’s thresholding algorithm [30]
due to its optimal threshold setting in bimodal images.
Two examples of the above RSB detection are demon-
strated in Fig. 9. Figs. 9(a) and (b) are the detected
vehicle images with activated and inactivated brake lights,
respectively. Figs. 9(c) and (d) show the image Is of each
taillight region. One can observe that besides the non-red
areas of taillights, activated brake lights yield additional holes
at their bright regions in Is in comparison with inactivated
brake lights. Such holes show high symmetry in Fig. 9(e),
which gives the FRST result by considering only negative-
affected pixels and the red-to-blue color indicates high-to-low
shape symmetry. As for inactivated brake lights, only non-
red regions are of high symmetry, as shown in Fig. 9(f).
This significant characteristic is our primary concern and is
subsequently utilized to determine whether the brake light is
activated or not (to be explained later). After applying Otsu’s
thresholding algorithm, there may be more than one blob as
well as some noises obtained, as shown in Figs. 9(g) and (h).
1 The negative-affected pixel is the pixel a certain distance away that the
gradient is pointing directly away from. For more details, please refer to [29].
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2016
Fig. 10. Brake light detection for a vehicle with taillights in a shape of a
vertical rectangle (height > width). (a) Detected vehicle image. (b) Obtained
taillight region. (c) Is . (d) Pseudo color presentation of I f . (e) Io . (f) Ib .
Fig. 11. Brake light detection for a vehicle with double brake lights in
each taillight region. (a) Detected vehicle image. (b) Obtained taillight region.
(c) Is . (d) Pseudo color presentation of I f . (e) Io . (f) Ib .
Therefore, the next step is to select an appropriate blob as a
potential brake light in each taillight region.
For noise removal, we first apply morphological operations
and eliminate small blobs. Although all vehicles will differ
in appearance, with different styles and designs of taillights,
they must adhere to automotive regulations [15]. In general, if
a taillight is in a shape of a horizontal rectangle, i.e., its width
w is larger than its height h, the brake light will be located near
the outer sides of the vehicle for better attention attraction, as
shown in Fig. 9(a). Otherwise, for a taillight in a shape of a
vertical rectangle, i.e., h > w, the brake light will be located at
the top side, as shown in Fig. 10(a), wherein the lower bright
blob in the right taillight region is an activated turn signal.
Based on this observation, we retain the topmost blob in a
w×h taillight region, if h > w, as shown in Fig. 10; otherwise,
the outermost one is retained. There is also the case that one
taillight region contains more than one brake light. For the case
of a taillight region containing double or multiple brake lights,
as shown in Fig. 11, retaining the outermost/topmost one is
sufficient for the subsequent brake light status determination.
Some results of this potential brake light selection, termed Ib ,
are presented in Figs. 9(i), 9(j), 10(f), and 11(f).
D. Brake Light Status Determination
The detected RSBs can successfully extract the bright
regions of illuminated brake lights. However, when brake
lights are not activated, the RSBs are located at non-red
symmetric areas, as shown in Fig. 9(j). In comparison, such
non-red areas are less bright than the RSBs detected in
activated brake lights. Therefore, we utilize the luminance
feature and count the number of high intensity pixels in
a RSB as the feature for brake light status determination.
CHEN et al.: DAYTIME PRECEDING VEHICLE BRAKE LIGHT DETECTION USING MONOCULAR VISION
Fig. 12. Number of high intensity pixels over time with some corresponding
detection results of vehicles, taillight regions, and RSBs given below.
For feature normalization, the vehicle width is also taken into
consideration. More explicit processing steps are explained as
follows.
The taillight region R of the original video frame is first
converted to a grayscale image I R . We take Ib (the result of
potential brake light selection) as a mask and apply it to I R
that the pixels in I R corresponding to zero entries in Ib are
set to zero, as formulated by
I R = M (I R )
Ib
where M Ib (.) denotes the masking operation with Ib . Then,
we use a simple step function B(u) to discard the pixels with
intensity less than a threshold τb , and count the number Nb
of the remaining high intensity pixels, as formulated by
 j
1, if u ≥ τb ,
B(u) = (9)
0, otherwise.
 
Nb =  B(I  ), R (10)
where ||.|| returns the number of nonzero pixels.
An example is given in Fig. 12, wherein the horizontal
and vertical axes of the chart indicate the frame number
and the number of high intensity pixels, respectively. Some
corresponding detection results of vehicles, taillight regions,
and RSBs are presented below the chart. One can see that
when the brake light is not activated, e.g., f = 56 and 192,
the RSBs are located at non-red regions, and consequently
contain very few high intensity pixels. Once the brake lights
are activated, e.g., f = 65, 132, and 215, the detected RSBs
can appropriately match the brake lights, resulting in abrupt
increase in the number of high intensity pixels.
However, the varied distance between the preceding vehicle
and the camera will affect the measure of Nb . Thus, we
compute the horizontal distance between the outer sides of the
RSB pair as the vehicle width wv , and produce a normalized
feature N as2
N = Nb /w2v .
2 The square of w is used because the area of a brake light region is
v
proportional to the square of the vehicle width.
125
Fig. 13. Flowchart of the detection refinement algorithm.
Then, the status of a brake light is determined as activated
if its N is greater than a threshold τ N . If both the left and
right brake lights are activated, it can be concluded that the
preceding vehicle is braking.
III. D ETECTION R EFINEMENT U SING
T EMPORAL I NFORMATION
In the previous section, the detection is conducted in a single
(8) frame. Since a DVR captures successive frames, temporal
information can be exploited for further refinement of the
detection process.
j
Let Vt −1 and Vti be the vehicles detected in two successive
frames Ft −1 and Ft , respectively. Consider that the position
of a vehicle may not change very much in successive frames.
Therefore, if more than 50% of Vt −1 is overlapped by Vti ,3
j
we can regard Vt −1 and Vti as the same vehicle, and we call
this vehicle being tracked. A vehicle Vti without corresponding
detection in the previous frame is regarded as a new detection.
j
For a tracked vehicle Vt −1 in the previous frame, if no
corresponding detection can be found in the current frame,
there is probably a vehicle detection miss because a vehicle
rarely disappears suddenly. In this case, we perform taillight
j
extraction and paring within the corresponding region of Vt −1
in the current frame. If one verified taillight pair can be
j
obtained, we claim that the vehicle Vt −1 is detected at the
same position in the current frame, as Vti . With such temporal
information-based refinement, some misses in HOG-based
vehicle detection can be recovered. A flowchart of this process
is given in Fig. 13, and the detailed algorithm is explained
in Algorithm 1.
Moreover, a similar mechanism can be applied to tail-
light extraction. For a tracked vehicle Vt −1 with verified
taillights L t −1 and Rt −1 in the previous frame Ft −1 , as shown
Fig. 14(a), we can search the taillights in the current frame Ft
around the positions of L t −1 and Rt −1 , instead of the whole
3 On average, the width of a vehicle is no less than 1.65m. To move out
(11)
of the 50% threshold within the duration of two successive frames at 30 fps,
a vehicle must reach a lateral speed (relative to the camera) higher than
89.1 km/hr (= 50% × 1.65m × 30/s = 24.75 m/s), which rarely happens even
on a super highway.
126 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2016

Algorithm 1 Detection Refinement Algorithm

 
Input: V = Vt0 , Vt1 , . . . , Vtm : the vehicles detected in the
current frame Ft by the HOG-based approach.
Output: V: refined vehicle detection results.
1: for each detected vehicle Vti in the current frame Ft
2: Vti .tracked = false;
3: Find in the previous frame Ft −1 the detected vehicle
j
Vt −1 which is closest to Vti ;
   
 j   j 
4: if (Vti ∩ Vt −1  / Vt −1  > 50%) then
j
5: if Vt −1 has not been linked to any vehicle in Ft
then
/∗ Vt −1 and Vti are regarded as the same
j

vehicle. ∗ /
j
6: Link Vt −1 to Vti ;
Fig. 14. Enhancing taillight extraction with the aid of temporal information.
7: Vt .tracked = true;
i
(a) A tracked vehicle Vt−1 with verified taillights L t−1 and Rt−1 in the
j q
8: else if Vt −1 has been linked to a vehicle Vt in Ft previous frame Ft−1 . (b) Searching taillights in the current frame Ft around
then the positions of L t−1 and Rt−1 . (c) Illustration of search region setting
for taillight candidates. (d) The a∗ component image of each search region.
/∗ compare the overlap areas and assign Vt −1
j
(e) Binarization of (d). (f) Taillight candidates obtained after morphological
to the ∗
 one with the larger
 overlap
 area. / operations and connected component analysis.
 i j   q j 
9: if (Vt ∩ Vt −1  > Vt ∩ Vt −1 ) then TABLE I
j PARAMETER S ETTING U SED IN THE P ROPOSED S YSTEM
10: Link Vt −1 to Vti ;
11: Vti .tracked = true;
12: end if
13: end if
14: end if
15: if (!Vti .tracked) /∗ no vehicle is linked to Vti ∗ /
16: Consider Vti as a new detection;
17: end for /∗ from line# 1 ∗ /
j
18: for each Vt −1 in Ft −1
j j
19: if (Vt −1 .tracked and Vt −1 links to no vehicle in Ft )
then The corresponding results are shown in Figs. 14(d)-(f). With
/∗ This implies a potential miss. ∗ / the aid of temporal information, not only the search regions for
20: Search taillight pairs {P1 , P2 , . . .} in Ft within the taillight candidates can be reduced, but more reliable taillight
j
bounding region of Vt −1 ; pairs are obtained, effectively improving both computational
21: for each taillight pair Pk efficiency and detection accuracy.
/∗ Find if there exists a verified taillight pair. ∗/

22: if (Pk is verified) then

IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
23: Add to V the vehicle detection Vti with the
same bounding region as Vt −1 ;
j To evaluate the performance of the proposed daytime brake
/∗ recover a miss. ∗ / light detection system, experiments are conducted on a video
24:
j
Link Vt −1 to Vti ; dataset which we collect using front-mounted DVRs. Totally,
25: Vti .tracked = true; there are 36 video sequences (about 1 to 5 minutes per clip),
26: break; among which 22 sequences are used for training and the
27: end if other 14 are for testing. The video resolution is 1920 × 1080
28: end for /∗ from line# 21 ∗ / and the frame rate is 30 fps. The setting of the parameters
29: end if used in our proposed system is shown in Table I, wherein
30: end for /∗ from line# 18 ∗ / the parameters τa , τs , ρ, α, rmin , and rmax are determined
empirically based on our collected DVR video dataset, and
the other parameters τb and τ N are learned from training data
(to be discussed in Sec. IV-B).
vehicle region, as shown in Fig. 14(b). More specifically, the
search region for L t (or Rt ) in Ft is set at the center of
L t −1 with triple the height and width of L t −1 , as illustrated A. Results of Preceding Vehicle Detection
in Fig. 14(c). After similar processing steps as conducted For vehicle detection, a HOG-based approach is conducted
in Sec. II-B, we only have to check whether the largest for vehicle candidate extraction and then taillight symmetry
RSBs in the left and right search regions can be paired. verification is performed to reduce false alarms. The number
CHEN et al.: DAYTIME PRECEDING VEHICLE BRAKE LIGHT DETECTION USING MONOCULAR VISION 127

TABLE II
R ESULTS OF V EHICLE D ETECTION

of cascade stages of boosted classifiers with HOG features

is 15 and the maximum false alarm rate is set to 0.5 per stage.
For classifier training, 550 vehicle images are manually
segmented from the training video sequences as positive sam-
ples, and 1100 non-vehicle images are automatically generated
as negative ones. In the 14 test video sequences, there are
4699 frames containing a total of 7394 vehicles, of
which 6545 are within the preset ROI. We manually draw
the bounding box of each vehicle over frames as ground
truth. A detection is regarded as correct if the detected Fig. 15. Results of vehicle detection (a) under high luminance conditions
vehicle overlaps a ground truth vehicle, and the ratio of their and (b) under low luminance conditions or in the shadow.
intersection to their union is greater than 70%.
The results of vehicle detection are presented in Table II,
wherein four methods (i) VD, (ii) TSV, (iii) TIR,
and (iv) TIRW are compared. (i) VD, which performs
HOG-based vehicle detection only, achieves a high detection
rate of 90.88% that 5948 vehicles out of the total 6545 can
be correctly detected. However, if no additional vehicle verifi-
cation process is conducted, VD will produce numerous false
detections, yielding a high false alarm rate of up to 42.61%. Fig. 16. Examples of false detection due to (a) improper pairing of red
(ii) Conducting HOG-based detection followed by a taillight objects around the bus and (b) incorrect taillight pairing.
symmetry verification process, TSV effectively reduces the
false alarm rate to 3.18%. However, some correct detections
yielded by VD may be eliminated by TSV due to no appropri-
ate taillight pair being verified, resulting in a lower detection
rate of 79.42%. (iii) Applying temporal information-based
refinement, TIR is capable of miss recovery and raises the
detection rate to 89.38% with a low false alarm rate of 1.5%.
(iv) Besides, we also conduct TIP to detect vehicles within
the whole video frame (termed TIRW), instead of the preset
ROI only. In this way, the detection and false alarm rates are
82.35% and 2.87%, respectively. One major reason causing
the performance degradation of TIRW is that, compared to
the vehicles within the centered ROI, the vehicles aside are
easier to be missed due to the deflective viewing angle from
the camera to the vehicles.
The vehicle detection results demonstrated in Fig. 15 verify Fig. 17. Examples of detection miss, wherein the vehicles missed
in (a) and (b) can be detected in (c) and (d), respectively, when the brake
the effectiveness of the proposed approach under both high and lights are activated.
low luminance conditions. There are still some false alarms
yielded by improperly pairing red objects in the surrounding can thus be detected correctly, as shown in Figs. 17(c) and (d).
environment, as indicated by the red arrow in Fig. 16(a) and This phenomenon can also be verified by the results given in
the left arrow in Fig. 16(b). The right arrow in Fig. 16(b) Table III that the detection rate of vehicles with inactivated
indicates another example of incorrect taillight pairing. brake lights are 83.93%, but with activated brake lights, up to
Figs. 17(a) and (b) show examples of detection misses, 95.88% of vehicles can be successfully detected.
wherein the preceding vehicles indicated by arrows cannot be
detected for the reason that their taillights in the frames are B. Results of Brake Light Detection
not within our preset color range due to very low luminance. To show the effectiveness of our proposed brake light detec-
However, once their brake lights are activated, the taillight tion approach as well as the parameter setting, we compute
color will fall within the preset color range and these vehicles the intensity histograms of detected RSBs from 500 activated
128 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2016

TABLE III
R ESULTS OF V EHICLE D ETECTION W ITH I NACTIVATED /
A CTIVATED B RAKE L IGHTS

Fig. 18. Intensity histograms of RSBs from 500 activated brake lights and
500 inactivated ones.

brake lights and 500 inactivated ones. The histograms are

given in Fig. 18, wherein the horizontal and vertical axes
denote the pixel intensity and frequency, respectively. The
green and blue histograms represent activated and inactivated
brake lights, respectively. It is readily observable that the
threshold τb = 180, indicated by the red dotted line, is
effective to differentiate the two cases.
For qualitative evaluation, some brake light detection results
are presented in Fig. 19. The first column shows a sequence
of successive video frames, wherein fuchsia rectangles mark
detected vehicles, and green/yellow rectangles indicate inac-
tivated/activated brake lights. The second column shows the
close-up view of each detected taillight, wherein the blue-
lined region indicates the detected RSB. The third column
gives the intensity histograms of detected RSBs of left and
right taillights (marked with green and fuchsia, respectively).
In this test sequence, the brake lights of the preceding yellow
vehicle are not activated in the first two frames.4 From
Figs. 19(1.b)-(2.b), one can see that the detected RSBs do
not match the brake lights, and the intensity values of the
pixels in RSBs are not high, as shown in Figs. 19(1.c)-(2.c).
When the brake lights are activated, the RSBs can be appro-
priately located at the bright regions of brake lights, as shown
in Figs. 19(3.b)-(6.b), resulting in relatively larger intensity
values of the pixels in RSBs. Accordingly, activated brake
lights can be effectively discriminated from inactivated ones.
Fig. 20 demonstrates the results of another test sequence.
In the first three frames, the preceding vehicle is under the
shadow of a building, as shown in Figs. 20(1.a)-(3.a), and
its brake light is activated in the second and third frames.
For the last three frames, the preceding vehicle leaves the
shadow, encountering a sudden change of environment light,
as shown in Figs. 20(4.a)-(6.a). The lighting change leads to no
false alarm since it causes intensity increase in whole taillight
regions, as shown in Figs. 20(4.b)-(6.b), so that the proposed
system does not produce RSBs with sufficient bright pixels,
as shown in Figs. 20(4.c)-(6.c).
4 The discussion here focuses on the preceding yellow vehicle. In fact,
the activated brake lights of the black vehicle in the left lane can also be
successfully detected.
Fig. 19. (a) Frames showing the status transition from non-braking to braking.
(b) Close-up views of segmented taillight regions, wherein the blue-lined
regions indicate detected RSBs. (c) Intensity histograms of the corresponding
RSBs in (b).
The quantitative evaluation of brake light detection is
presented in Table IV, wherein different values of the thresh-
old τ N are tested. The term “ground truth” indicates that
2985 vehicles, out of the total 6546 in all test frames, have
activated brake lights. Continued from the preceding vehicle
detection, the term “correct detection” represents both the
vehicle and its activated brake lights are successfully detected.
Note that since some vehicles with activated brake lights have
been missed in the preceding process, the detection rate here
cannot reach 100% no matter what value τ N is. The results
show that both the detection rate and false alarm rate increase
with τ N . In our system, a recommended τ N value is 2 × 10−4 ,
which can achieve a satisfactory detection rate of 87.60%
with an acceptable low false alarm rate of no more than 2%.
By statistics, 72 misses and 21 false alarms, out of the total
370 and 53 respectively, can be recovered in subsequent
frames. The threshold τ N can also be user-adjusted, since some
drivers may prefer a higher detection rate and tolerate more
false alarms, while others may lose concentration on driving
if there are too many false alarms.
CHEN et al.: DAYTIME PRECEDING VEHICLE BRAKE LIGHT DETECTION USING MONOCULAR VISION
Fig. 20. (a) Frames of a test sequence with a sudden change of environment
light. (b) Close-up views of segmented taillight regions, wherein the blue-lined
regions indicate detected RSBs. (c) Intensity histograms of the corresponding
RSBs in (b).
TABLE IV
R ESULTS OF B RAKE L IGHT D ETECTION
Fig. 21 shows some examples of incorrect brake light
detection. In Figs. 21(a) and (b), the brake signals of the
vehicles indicated by red arrows are not detected due to
inappropriate taillight extraction and pairing. For the white
vehicle in Fig. 21(c), the bright region of the right brake light
is hardly seen due to the deflective view of the vehicle’s back,
causing a detection miss. In Fig. 21(d), the white vehicle is
nearly overexposed that it is difficult to recognize whether the
brake light is activated or not.
Intensity, radial symmetry, and entropy are important char-
acteristics for daytime brake light detection. Based on these
129
Fig. 21. Examples of incorrect brake light detection due to (a)-(b) inap-
propriate taillight extraction and pairing, (c) deflective view of the vehicle’s
back, and (d) overexposure.
TABLE V
S UMMARY OF THE F EATURES U SED IN THE C OMPARED
M ETHODS AND O UR P ROPOSED M ETHOD
characteristics, several features can be designed. Hence, for
comparison we implement eight other brake light detection
methods using different features, as summarized in Table V,
and give the information of how these methods perform.
Method-1, as proposed in [22], computes the average of
pixel intensity in each taillight region. The changes of such
intensity average are used to infer a light state transition: either
on-to-off or off-to-on. If both left and right taillight regions
demonstrate an off-to-on state transition, the signal is classified
as braking. Method-2 computes the average of pixel intensity
in the RSB of each taillight region. If the intensity averages
of both left and right RSBs are greater than a threshold,
a braking event is detected. Method-3 considers the number of
pixels in the RSB of each taillight region as a feature. If the
pixel numbers of both left and right RSBs are greater than
a threshold, the vehicle is considered as braking. Method-4
computes the number of high-intensity pixels in each taillight
region. Similarly, if both left and right taillight regions contain
a sufficient number of high-intensity pixels, a braking event is
detected. Method-5 (Method-6) computes the intensity entropy
(gradient entropy) of the taillight region. A braking event is
detected if the entropies of both taillight regions are greater
than a threshold. Method-7 (Method-8) computes the intensity
entropy (gradient entropy) of the RSB, and then applies
thresholding for braking /non-braking classification.
The comparison of these methods is evaluated using
the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), where the
130
Fig. 22. Performance comparison using the Receiver Operating
Characteristic.
independent variable is the feature threshold. The ROC curves
are shown in Fig. 22, wherein the horizontal and vertical
axes denote the false positive rate (FPR) and the true pos-
itive rate (TPR), respectively. Please note that the highest
TPR and FPR cannot reach 100%, which are 95.88% and
83.93% respectively, because some vehicles with activated or
inactivated brake lights have been missed in the preceding
vehicle detection. A ROC curve more close to the top left
corner indicates better performance. The comparison shows
that our proposed method outperforms the others. Method-4,
which performs the second best, can also be a good choice
for daytime brake light detection since it can achieve higher
TPRs if tolerating more false positives.
The proposed system is implemented in C++ with OpenCV
2.45 libraries and test on a desktop computer under Windows
7 64 bits OS with Intel i7-3770 CPU @3.4 GHz and 8 GB
RAM. Considering the computation cost, the proposed system
can perform brake light detection for a frame in 0.11 seconds
and the frame rate is about 9 fps.
V. C ONCLUSION
Since distracting driving has been one of the main causes
of traffic accidents, more and more car owners thirst for
assistance systems for warning drivers of potential hazards.
Signaling vehicle deceleration and potential collision, brake
lights are of vital importance. In this paper, we propose a
vision-based approach for daytime brake light detection using
a driving video recorder. Although visual features, motions,
and appearances of vehicles are highly visible at daytime,
brake lights are inconspicuous due the low contrast to ambient
light. Besides, the light scattering effect is not as obvious as
it is at night, making it more difficult to detect brake lights
at daytime. Hence, we propose a hierarchical scheme that
preceding vehicles are first extracted with a taillight symmetry
verification, and then brake light detection is conducted by
integrating both luminance and radial symmetry features.
A detection refinement process using temporal information
is also employed for miss recovery. Experiments on a video
data set collected in real traffic environments by front-mounted
driving video recorders show that the proposed system can
effectively detect brake lights at daytime with a detection rate
of up to 87.6%, showing its good feasibility in real-world
environments.
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2016
Currently, we are working on improving the computation
efficiency to detect a braking event more promptly. On the
other hand, some modern vehicles have three brake lights:
two on the sides and the third one in the middle. It will
be our future work to take the third light into consideration
to enhance the detection of braking events. Another future
research direction is to develop a deep learning approach
for daytime brake light detection, which may yield better
performance if big training data are used.
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131
Hua-Tsung Chen (A’07–S’09–M’09) received the
B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science
and information engineering from National Chiao
Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2001, 2003,
and 2009, respectively.
He is currently an Assistant Research Fellow with
the Information and Communications Technology
Laboratory, National Chiao Tung University.
His research interests include computer vision,
video signal processing, content-based video
indexing and retrieval, multimedia information
system, and music signal processing.
Yi-Chien Wu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in computer science from National Chiao Tung
University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2013 and 2015,
respectively.
Her research interests include computer vision,
video signal processing, and video surveillance
system.
Chun-Chieh Hsu (S’12) received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees in computer science from National
Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2009
and 2011, respectively, where he is currently pursu-
ing the Ph.D. degree in computer science.
His research interests include computer vision,
video signal processing, sports video analysis, and
video surveillance system.