Intruder Vehicle Detection During a Platoon Joining Maneuver

To perform the different platoon maneuvers such as joining, merging, splitting, etc., platoon communication requires considerable cooperation among platoon members. The joining operation is the most difficult to achieve when a new member wants to insert itself into the middle of the platoon. Indeed, some interferences due to the intrusion of an unwanted vehicle in the middle of the platoon lead to the aborting of the joining maneuver by the eligible vehicle and to communication problems between the already existing members. In this context, we propose a Visual based method for Intruder vehicle Detection, denoted “VID”. The main idea is to detect and classify vehicles (unwanted or not) during the join maneuver by analyzing the video recorded by the on-board cameras installed at the front of the platoon trucks. The performance of our method is tested and validated using videos of highway scenes in different weather conditions (sunny, rainy, cloudy). The obtained results show that VID can identify the intruder with rates higher than 89% and 95% for precision and recall respectively.