Method for reducing false activations in reverse collision avoidance systems

A collision avoidance system for a vehicle is disclosed that includes at least one sensor mounted to a vehicle to measure the vehicle's environment in the reverse driving direction, a controller which creates a feature vector based on relationships among data provided by at least one sensor, and a non-volatile memory which stores feature vectors and related object configurations for a number of different environments. The system utilizes a comparison between the current feature vector and previously stored feature vectors to match the current environment with a previously observed environment, and then loads a previously stored object configuration which can improve collision detection performance to reduce the number of unnecessary system interventions.