The objective of a driver assistance system (DAS) is to increase the safety, efficiency, and comfort of driving. Of these three benefits, driving safety is the most important and is the major concern in this thesis. Driving is actually a sophisticated process. Its performance depends on two essential aspects, the temperament of drivers and the technology of the vehicle. We pay particular attention to the driver factor. There are two kinds of factors, external and internal, which affect the behavior of a driver. The external factor comes from the driver\u2019s knowledge about the traffic environment, while the internal factor comes from the driver\u2019s anticipation. These two factors are intrinsically related; that is, the better understanding of the environmental situation a driver has, the more appropriate his anticipations will be.

Diverse sensors have been developed for acquiring information from traffic scenes. In this study we are interested in visual sensors, such as cameras and video camcorders. Although visual sensors possess a number of advantages, several difficulties have been encountered when deploying such sensors on vehicles. First, image instability results from vehicle motion and camera vibration. Second, visual sensors are sensitive to both weather and lighting conditions. Third, the images acquired during daytime and nighttime are quite different in characteristic. Finally, images recording 2D projections of 3D scenes inevitably make image interpretation an ill-posed task. Application systems based on visual sensors should be able to take account of the aforementioned difficulties.

In this thesis a vision-based driver assistance system (VDAS) is considered. Since no formal definition for a VDAS has ever been given, any functions that contribute to driving safety can be considered a part of VDAS. In this thesis three important functions are considered, including road sign detection and recognition, change detection of critical driving environments, and motion detection of nearby moving vehicles. In order to realize these functions, we have proposed a dynamic visual model (DVM), which is a computational model for visual analysis based on video sequences. The model, primarily inspired by the human visual system, provides an underlying framework in which three subsystems performing the three functions mentioned above are developed. Note that the proposed DVM is a general-purpose

Our goal is to design artificial sub-systems with properties similar to natural systems as a way of improving the understanding of natural processes. The main contributions of our research are the development of the DVM and its STA neural modules. Our DVM adapts certain characteristics of the human vision system to develop some techniques for computer vision. Our STA neural module is created to collect spatial and temporal information in video sequences and encode this information into an attention map. This neural module can be utilized to detect environmental changes and object motions. We also develop sub-systems to overcome problems caused by camera vibration, to integrate temporal information, and to extract suitable features for different DAS applications.

The research presented here makes heavy use of neural networks. We discuss the DVM in Chapter 2. There are three types of neural modules involved in the configuration of the DVM; they are a spatiotemporal attention neural module, a configurable adaptive resonance theory neural module, and a configurable heteroassociative memory neural module. Their details, including architectures and mathematical formulations, are given in Chapter 3. Based on the proposed DVM, the three subsystems for the VDAS are developed in Chapters 4 to 6, which include the descriptions, experimental results, and concluding remarks of the subsystems, respectively. Of course, our current VDAS is still far from complete. More subsystems of different functions are expected to be developed in the future. Moreover, a mechanism for coordinating subsystems should be developed as well. Chapter 7 addresses our plans for future work.

1.1 Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026. 1.2 Driver Assistance Systems (DAS)\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026... 1.3 Vision-Based Driver Assistance Systems (VDAS)\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.. 1.4 Dynamic Visual Model (DVM)\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026... 1.5 VDAS Subsystems\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026...

1.5.1 Road Sign Detection and Recognition System ..\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026... 1.5.2 Driving Environmental Change Detection System\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.. 1.5.3 Vehicle Motion Detection System\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026

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2.1 The Human Visual System\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026... 2.1.1 Structure and Motion Perceptions\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026... 2.1.2 Pattern Recognition\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 2.1.3 Parallel Distributed Processing\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.. \u2026 \u2026.

2.2 Dynamic Visual Model\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026. 2.2.1 Human Visual Process\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 2.2.2 Computational Model\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.

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