A new method of designing control sensors for intelligent transport systems (ITS) is proposed in which blooming is estimated by partial autocorrelation analysis, the distance from the focal point to the object is derived, and the distance to the object is measured. In partial autocorrelation analysis, forward prediction and backward prediction are carried out simultaneously so that the point spread function convoluted with the blooming image is linearly predicted and the amount of blooming is estimated. The two‐dimensional analysis requires a significant amount of processing and highly accurate operation. Therefore, in this method, by preprocessing in the frequency dimension, only the horizontal components are extracted for analysis. From the experimental results, it is found that distance estimation from a single image is possible near the focal length (2.5 m–1.7 m). © 1999 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 82(1): 23–33, 1999