Real-Time Automatic Obstacle Detection and Alert System for Driver Assistance on Indian Roads

Road crashes have been a major problem in India in recent times. The occurrences have increased considerably owing to the influx of four-wheelers and two-wheelers on Indian roads. The number of road traffic collisions has also increased due to the absence of automatic highway safety and alert systems on major roads connecting cities and towns. The interior roads connecting villages and towns have been instrumental in multiple animal-vehicle collisions. Although the figure is not too large compared to other causes of road-related injuries, they are significant in number. The associated number of fatalities and injuries are substantial too. Though numerous efforts have been in progress to solve and reduce the number of collisions, lack of practical applications and resources along with quality analytical data (for training and testing) related to animal-vehicle collision has impeded any major breakthrough in the scenario. In our current work, we have proposed and designed a system based on histogram research including oriented gradients and boosted cascade classifiers for automatic cow detection. The Indian cow has been the biggest obstacle compared to other animals on Indian roads. The distance between a cow and the vehicle is calculated prompting an alert signal to notify the driver for applying brakes or undertake any similar action. The method is implemented in Opencv software and tested on various video clips involving cow movements in various scenarios. The proposed system has achieved an overall efficiency of 80% in terms of cow detection. The proposed system is a low-cost, highly reliable system which can easily be implemented in automobiles for detection of cow or any other animal after proper training and testing on the highway.