DISTANCE ESTIMATION OF VEHICLE HEADLIGHTS

A method for determining the distance to a vehicle for use in an AHC-System includes capturing a raw image by using a camera of an AHC-System at nighttime; determining by the AHC-System that the raw image includes a headlight of a vehicle; extracting by the AHC-System an image segment of the raw image including the headlight of a vehicle; refining the image segment by applying a classifier, such as to generate a refined image including the headlight of a vehicle; building a feature vector based on the refined image; and estimating the distance to the vehicle based on the feature vector. The present invention also relates to an image processing system adapted to perform the above method.