VEHICLE DETECTION USING HOG AND SVM
BHIMA PHANI BHARGAV
M.Tech
School of computing Science & Enginnering
VIT University,Chennai
baargavb@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Improving safety and reducing accidents are the
most goals of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
(ADAS). For their low cost and capability of providing
information about driving environments, Vision-based
driver assistance systems are the most important
systems in recent years. In these systems, robust and
precise vehicle detection is a critical step, and the
detected cars can be used for various applications. This
paper presents an algorithm for vehicle detection in an
urban environment which is very important for driver
assistance systems and autonomous driving. To succeed
the detection of a vehicle, we propose the histogram of
oriented gradients features descriptor (HOG) and linear
support vector machine (SVM) for the classification.
Our experimental results illustrate the robustness and
precision of our algorithm for different scenes.
Keywords—vehicle detection; histogram of oriented
gradients features descriptor; support vector machine.
INTRODUCTION
Every year traffic accidents increased sharply. More than
50,000 people are killed about these accidents in USA. The
most causes of accidents is driver defects so human security
is threatened. To reduce this huge number of deaths we
think about the automated driving. Many systems have
appeared such as Driver Assistance Systems (DAS). These
systems have been a popular research topic last years. Car
detection is a challenging part of the DAS.
There have been many researches for vision-based vehicle
detection. And Support Vector Machine (SVM) with
Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) became one of the
popular approaches. The HOG feature basically uses the
gradient information of objects. Because the typical
appearance of vehicle has clear edges in vertical and
horizontal directions, the HOG can be a good candidate as a
visual feature of vehicle. And SVM is an effective scheme
that is widely used for the classification of various objects.
We can expect much better accuracy as well as robustness
to wild environment by using this combination.
Dr. ASNATH PHAMILA.Y
Associate Professor
School of Computuing Science & Enginnering
VIT University,Chennai
asnathvicty.phamila@vit.ac.in
PREVIOUS WORK
One of the features that is widely used in object
detection is the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG).
The HOG feature is firstly introduced by Dalal and
Triggs [1] with application on pedestrian detection but
it had been used in various object detection applications
including vehicle detection [2], [3], and [4].
Since then efforts had been made to improve the
discriminative power of HOG introducing different
changes on Dalal and Triggs HOG version.
In [5], Zhang et al. introduced the local structured HOG
(LSHOG) fused with local structured Local Binary
Pattern (LSLBP) and applied it for object detection.
In [6], Cheon et al. made use of the symmetry in HOG
feature vector for symmetric objects such as vehicles
and introduced a new HOG variant called symmetric
HOG.
In [7], Kim et al. concatenated position and intensity
data for the original HOG to form a position and
intensity HOG (𝜋HOG).
Recently Kassani el at. [8], introduced the soft HOG
(sHOG) that depends on random selection of cells
position with symmetric features and applied it on
traffic sign detection.
However, all the mentioned efforts maintained the
same gradient calculation method as in conventional
HOG. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new
HOG variant using compass gradient mask in the
calculation of HOG that is proved to increase the
discriminative power of the original HOG on vehicle
detection. The classification part is done using the
support vector machines (SVM) [9] which is widely
used in literature in combination with the HOG feature.
PROPOSED APPROACH
The car detection algorithm begins with the training
phase. In this step, we used the Gradient Histograms to
extract the characteristics of an image.
After training, we pass to the classification of captured
and processed images. This step requires a robust
classification method. For that, we used the SVM
technique. Fig.1 illustrates the steps of our algorithm.

Figure 1. Car detection architecture
METHODOLOGY
A. HOG features
The calculation of HOG function is based on edge gradient
orientation histograms for vehicle detection. This technique
counts occurrences of gradient orientation in localized
portions of an image. Local object appearance and shape
can often be characterized rather well by the distribution of
local intensity gradients or edge direction.
HOG features are calculated according to the following:
1.Compute horizontal GH and vertical GV gradients image.
2.Calculate norm and orientation of the gradient.
3.The window of image is divided in M u N cells.
4.Build histogram of orientation for each cell:
The cell histogram is visualized by a 'star' showing the
strength of the edge orientations in the histogram.
5.Group several cells in a block to realize the normalization.
Figure 2.HOG features extraction
B. SVM: Support Vector Machine
The methods for classification are numerous: the
methods of the support vector machines (SVMs),
neural networks, etc. SVM is considered easier to use
than the neural network.
The support vector machine is a supervised learning
technique destined to solve classification problems.
SVM exploit the concepts of the theory of statistical
learning and the boundary theory of Vapnik and
Chervonenkis.
This technique is a method of classification in two
classes whish tries to separate the positive examples
from negative example in the set of example. The
method then looks for the hyper plane that separates the
positive examples from the negative examples,
ensuring that the margin between the nearest positive
and negative is maximal. The advantage of this method
is the selection of support vectors that represented the
discriminate vectors by which is determined the hyper
plane.
Figure 3.Hyperplane separator and support vectors
It is obvious that there exists a multitude of valid
hyperplane but the remarkable property of the SVM is
that this hyperplane must be optimal. Therefore, one
must look among the valid hyper planes, that which
passes "in the middle" of the points of the two classes
of examples. Intuitively, this amounts to search the
"safest" hyperplane.
Indeed, a small variation will not modify its
classification if its distance to the hyperplane is large.
Formally, this means looking for a hyperplane whose
minimum distance to learning examples is maximal. This
distance is called "margin" between the hyperplane and
the examples. The optimal separator hyperplane is the one
that maximizes the margin.
 HEATMAPS

Given a few consecutive frames, notice that there are

overlapping detections and false positive detections are
spaced out. Build a heat map to combine overlapping
detections and remove false positives. To make a heat
map start with a blank grid and “add heat” for all
pixels within windows where positive detections are
reported by the classifier. The “hotter” the parts, the
more likely it is a true positive, and impose a threshold
to reject areas affected by the false positives.
Figure 4. Optimal hyperplane and maximum margin

CLASSIFIERTRAINING

The classifier algorithm used in this research is Linear

Support Vector Machine. A total number of 8,792 samples
of vehicle images and 8,968 samples of non-images. This
data set is preselected by Udacity with images from the GTI
vehicle image database and the KITTI vision benchmark
suite. As a safety measure, use a scaler to transform the raw
Figure 5.Heat Maps
features before feeding them to the classifier for training or
predicting, reducing the chance of the classifier to behave
badly.
SUMMARY
SLIDING WINDOWS
For this project,a software pipeline is excecuted to
detect and track vehicles from a video of a highway. To
A subregion of video frame is obtained and run that
do this, HOG features are extracted from the previously
classifier there to see if that patch contains a vehicle. Firstly,
collected data and fed them to a Linear Support Vector
we have to consider that getting the HOG features is
Machine classifier algorithm.Sliding window technique
extremely time consuming. Instead of getting the HOG
is used to check if subregions of a frame contain
features for each patch region with have many overlaps with
vehicles. Then heat maps are used over multiple
each other each time, the HOG features that are extracted of
consecutive frames to eliminate transient false positives
the whole frame at the beginning, then we pull out the
and gain confidence over multiple detection on the
features for each frame’s subregion as we need them.
same location.
The strip where the search was performed is decided by
HOG features of images in HLS and YUV color
eyeing the vehicles on the video. Notice that we should only
formats are good features to be used for classifying
search below the horizon.
vehicles. However, extracting 1,188 YUV HOG
features is extremely faster than extracting 7,056 HLS
HOG features so better use YUV (with 16 x 16 pixels
per cell and 11 orientations) over HLS (with 8 x 8
pixels per cell and 12 orientations).

OUTPUT
CONCLUSION
The synergistic approach that has been introduced in this
article achieves the main objectives. The precision is
improved for the proposed system for vehicle detection.
This system of detection currently operates at 22 frames per
second using a resolution of 960 u 720.
In this Paper the use of a Gradient Histograms (HOG) is
shown for the training phase and an SVM classifier for
classification step giving a good results for the detection of
vehicles.
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