Hi,
I am building a car app. It must use the Android camera and tell how far the car ahead is.
I don't even know if opencv is appropriate for this. Some have suggested Android NDK...
Thanks for discussion! jim
Of course OpenCV i appropriate for this but it's hard problem. Don't worry, there are solutions based on mono cam (for example mobileeye or I've seen some android apps).
There are plenty of ways to do this and you can experiment a lot, so good starting point is to read papers, I recommend work of Marcos Nieto ( http://marcosnieto.net/ ), good stuff there.
Basically you need to locate and recognize car ahead of you, and then you could try to estimate distance by bounding box size / perimeter / ... . You probably need to classify car to size categories and some machine learning may be involved.
Another way is to use bird-eye projection (just a simple perspective transform) on lane, but in this case may be hard (it will need calibration).
OpenCV can definitely be used to solve this problem, but first you need to be able to formulate an algorithm to estimate the depth from a single camera. Humans have two eyes for a reason :-)
Unfortunately I cannot help you in that department, but I will refer you to this Wikipedia page. You may also look for android augmented reality sdk.
Hopefully this will point you in the right direction to find solutions that are sufficient for your application.
To clarify:
Asked: 2013-05-26 21:09:36 -0600
Seen: 2,824 times
Last updated: May 27 '13
Start reading some articles on the topic. Car detection, collision avoidance, lane detection are some directions to read. You'll have a much better idea on where to start then.