A Road Luminance Measurement Application based on Android

Abstract

According to the statistics of traffic accidents over recent 5 years, traffic accidents during the night times happened more than the day times. There are various causes to occur traffic accidents and the one of the major causes is inappropriate or missing street lights that make driver's sight confused and causes the traffic accidents. In this paper, with smartphones, we designed and implemented a lane luminance measurement application which stores the information of driver's location, driving, and lane luminance into database in real time to figure out the inappropriate street light facilities and the area that does not have any street lights. This application is implemented under Native C/C++ environment using android NDK and it improves the operation speed than code written in Java or other languages. To measure the luminance of road, the input image with RGB color space is converted to image with YCbCr color space and Y value returns the luminance of road. The application detects the road lane and calculates the road lane luminance into the database sever. Also this application receives the road video image using smart phone's camera and improves the computational cost by allocating the ROI(Region of interest) of input images. The ROI of image is converted to Grayscale image and then applied the canny edge detector to extract the outline of lanes. After that, we applied hough line transform method to achieve the candidated lane group. The both sides of lane is selected by lane detection algorithm that utilizes the gradient of candidated lanes. When the both lanes of road are detected, we set up a triangle area with a height 20 pixels down from intersection of lanes and the luminance of road is estimated from this triangle area. Y value is calculated from the extracted each R, G, B value of pixels in the triangle. The average Y value of pixels is ranged between from 0 to 100 value to inform a luminance of road and each pixel values are represented with color between black and green. We store car location using smartphone's GPS sensor into the database server after analyzing the road lane video image with luminance of road about 60 meters ahead by wireless communication every 10 minutes. We expect that those collected road luminance information can warn drivers about safe driving or effectively improve the renovation plans of road luminance management.