Typography-Based Monocular Distance Estimation for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems
2026-07-01 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors explore whether a single regular camera can accurately measure how far away a car in front is by looking at its rear license plate. Since U.S. license plates have standardized sizes and character heights, their size in the image can be used to estimate distance. Their method uses measurements like character height and spacing along with a depth network to improve accuracy and reduce errors. This approach also identifies the vehicle and estimates collision timing, offering a low-cost alternative to traditional sensors like radar or lasers. Overall, the authors achieve precise distance estimates with errors under 0.13 meters.
license plate recognitionmonocular distance estimationcamera geometrytime-to-collisioncollision warning systemadaptive cruise controlvehicle identificationcamera calibrationdepth estimationimage-based measurement
Authors
Manognya Lokesh Reddy, Zheng Liu
Abstract
Estimating the distance to a leading vehicle is a basic input to forward collision warning, adaptive cruise control, and automated emergency braking. Production systems obtain this distance from radar, laser scanners, or stereo camera pairs, which add cost, power draw, and packaging constraints. This paper asks whether a single ordinary camera can recover the same distance by using a target that is standardized in size and present on every road vehicle: the rear license plate. U.S. plates share a fixed outer size and a character height that is set by regulation and varies only narrowly between states, so the height of a plate character in the image is a direct measure of distance once the camera geometry is known. The proposed method (Typography-Based Monocular Distance Estimation) detects the plate, measures the height of its printed characters, identifies the issuing state to select the correct physical character height, and recovers distance from the camera projection. Three measurements taken from the same plate: the character height, the stroke width, and the character spacing. Together with the spacing of the two mounting holes and a single-image depth network, are combined so that a weak or corrupted measurement is given less weight automatically. The distance, its rate of change, and a time-to-collision estimate are smoothed across frames and used to raise a warning with the timing used by U.S. collision-warning regulations. The same plate that anchors the scale also identifies the vehicle, so the method returns a distance, a bearing, and an identity from one passive sensor. It reads scale from a printed standard instead of from time of flight or parallax, making it a cheap, low-maintenance complement to those sensors in a fault-tolerant perception stack, achieving the cost-effective distance estimation with error less than 0.13 m.