Bird's-eye view vision system for vehicle surrounding monitoring

Blind spots usually lead to difficulties for drivers to maneuver their vehicles in complicated environments, such as garages, parking spaces, or narrow alleys. This paper presents a vision system which can assist drivers by providing the panoramic image of vehicle surroundings in a bird's-eye view. In the proposed system, there are six fisheye cameras mounted around a vehicle so that their views cover the whole surrounding area. Parameters of these fisheye cameras were calibrated beforehand so that the captured images can be dewarped into perspective views for integration. Instead of error-prone stereo matching, overlapping regions of adjacent views are stitched together by aligning along a seam with dynamic programming method followed by propagating the deformation field of alignment with Wendland functions. In this way the six fisheye images can be integrated into a single, panoramic, and seamless one from a look-down viewpoint. Our experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image-stitching method for providing the bird's eye view vision for vehicle surrounding monitoring.