Detection of Unfocused Raindrops on a Windscreen using Low Level Image Processing

Fawzi Nashashibi (1, 2) , Raoul de Charette (2) , Alexandre Lia (2)

1 IMARA - Informatique, Mathématiques et Automatique pour la Route Automatisée
2 CAOR - Centre de Robotique

In a scene, rain produces a complex set of visual effects. Obviously, such effects may infer failures in outdoor vision-based systems which could have important side-effects in terms of security applications. For the sake of these applications, rain detection would be useful to adjust their reliability. In this paper, we introduce the problem (almost unprecedented) of unfocused raindrops. Then, we present a first approach to detect these unfocused raindrops on a transparent screen using a spatio-temporal approach to achieve detection in real-time. We successfully tested our algorithm for Intelligent Transport System (ITS) using an on-board camera and thus, detected the raindrops on the windscreen. Our algorithm differs from the others in that we do not need the focus to be set on the windscreen. Therefore, it means that our algorithm may run on the same camera sensor as the other vision-based algorithms.

Mots clés: raindrop; rain; detection; vehicle; adverse condition; ITS; ADAS

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Fawzi Nashashibi, Raoul de Charette, Alexandre Lia. Detection of Unfocused Raindrops on a Windscreen using Low Level Image Processing. International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision : ICARV'2010, Dec 2010, Singapour, Singapore. pp.P0655. ⟨hal-00558591⟩