Method for determining the distance between an object and a motor vehicle by means of a monocular imaging device

A method for determining the distance of an object from a motor vehicle comprises the steps of capturing images of the vehicle surroundings at time intervals by means of a monocular image acquisition device, recognizing at least one object of interest in the captured images by means of an image processing system and assigning it to an object class, determining respective position specifications from the captured images using a pinhole camera model based on the object class, which position specifications indicate the location of a reference point of the recognized object relative to the roadway plane in world coordinates, estimating a scaling factor of the pinhole camera model by means of a Bayes estimator using the position specifications as observations and under the assumption that the reference point of the recognized object is located on the roadway plane with a predetermined probability, and calculating the distance of the recognized object from the motor vehicle from the estimated scaling factor using the pinhole camera model.