Visual Reconstruction of an Intersection by Integrating Cameras on Multiple Vehicles

A method is presented for generating a bird’s-eye view of a road traffic scene via the integration of multiple images from in-vehicle cameras; the resulting bird’s-eye view supports the goal of greater traffic safety. As there are typically many blind spots at any given intersection which could lead to accidents or traffic jams, if views can be obtained from multiple vehicles coming into an intersection from different directions, a bird's-eye view can be generated by integrating the images seen from each vehicle; images are projected onto a common ground plane to reproduce the intersection virtually. The presented method assumes that the geometry of the scene and all camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters relative to the car body are known. We estimate the orientation of each vehicle using vanishing points in each image and the 3D position of the foreground in an image by noting the volume of the intersection contained in the view.