US Patent 8121348 Object detection apparatus, method and program

An object detection apparatus for detecting an object from an image obtained by taking a front view picture of a road in a traveling direction of a vehicle includes a camera unit for taking the front view picture of the road and inputting the image; a dictionary modeling the object; a search unit for searching the image with a search window; a histogram production unit for producing a histogram by comparing the image in the search window with the dictionary and counting a detection frequency in a direction parallel to a road plane; and a detection unit for detecting the detection object by detecting a unimodal distribution from the histogram.