Method for detecting and tracking night running vehicle

The invention discloses a method for detecting and tracking a night running vehicle. The method is implemented according to the following steps of: (1) foreground detection: selecting vehicle lamp brightness to carry out foreground detection, and detecting a vehicle lamp region through detecting whether the brightness of each frame of pixel point in a video stream is larger than a set threshold or not; (2) noise elimination: removing most noise points from a binary image obtained from the step (1) and more accurately obtaining a foreground target; (3) vehicle lamp matching: pairing two vehicle lamps according to a corresponding principle, finding out a big front lamp pair and representing the vehicle by using the big front lamp pair; (4) vehicle lamp pair tracking: after finishing the vehicle lamp pairing according to the steps, tracking the vehicle lamp so as to realize the tracking of the vehicle; and (5) after retracking the target, matching the vehicle lamp pairs and finally obtaining a vehicle to be detected. The method for detecting and tracking the night running vehicle, disclosed by the invention, has the following advantages that: the night vehicle is detected by using the vehicle lamp characteristic; and in the method, simplicity for extracting algorithm characteristic and stable vehicle detecting effect are obtained.