Robust and efficient vehicle detection is an important task of environment perception of intelligent vehicles, which directly affects the behavior decision-making and motion planning of intelligent vehicles. Due to the rapid development of sensor and computer technology, the algorithm and technology of vehicle detection have been updated rapidly. But, there are few reviews on vehicle detection of intelligent vehicles, especially covering all kinds of sensors and algorithms in recent years. This article presents a comprehensive review of vehicle detection approaches and their applications in intelligent vehicle systems to analyze the development of vehicle detection, with a specific focus on sensor types and algorithm classification. First, more than 300 research contributions are summarized in this review, including all kinds of vehicle detection sensors (machine vision, millimeter-wave radar, lidar, and multisensor fusion), and the performance of the classic and latest algorithms was compared in detail. Then, the application scenarios of vehicle detection with different sensors and algorithms were analyzed according to their performance and applicability. Moreover, we also systematically summarized the methods of vehicle detection in adverse weather. Finally, the remaining challenges and future research trends were analyzed according to the development of intelligent vehicle sensors and algorithms.

This paper develops a novel adaptive $H_{\infty }$ control scheme for adaptive cruise control (ACC) system via the data-driven learning. In the proposed technique, a continuous time ACC system is first constructed with unknown system dynamics. To estimate the unknown system dynamics, an adaptive estimator is then formulated utilizing the vectorization and Kronecker's products operations, enabling the reconstruction of the unknown system dynamics through the detectable input/output information. An adaptive law is utilized to ensure the convergence of the estimated parameters. Moreover, a data-driven learning technique is employed to resolve the constructed Riccati equation in an online manner. To accomplish this, the Riccati equation is reformulated via the Kronecker's products by using another adaptive law, whose convergence can be also effectively guaranteed. Unlike existing neural network-based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithms, the data-driven learning scheme proposed in this paper does not involve neural network approximation errors, so the solution is relatively more accurate. Finally, simulation and experimental verification results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the presented $H_{\infty }$ control and data-driven learning algorithm.

Vehicle detection in severe weather has always been a difficult task in the environmental perception of intelligent vehicles. This paper proposes a vehicle detection method based on pseudo-visual search and the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)–local binary pattern (LBP) feature fusion. Using radar detection information, this method can directly extract the region of interest (ROI) of vehicles from infrared images by imitating human vision. Unlike traditional methods, the pseudo-visual search mechanism is independent of complex image processing and environmental interferences, thereby significantly improving the speed and accuracy of ROI extraction. More notably, the ROI extraction process based on pseudo-visual search can reduce image processing by 40%–80%, with an ROI extraction time of only 4 ms, which is far lower than the traditional algorithms. In addition, we used the HOG–LBP fusion feature to train the vehicle classifier, which improves the extraction ability of local and global features of vehicles. The HOG–LBP fusion feature can improve vehicle detection accuracy by 6%–9%, compared to a single feature. Experimental results show that the accuracy of vehicle detection is 92.7%, and the detection speed is 31 fps, which validates the feasibility of the proposed method and effectively improve the vehicle detection performance in severe weather

The accuracy and robustness of vehicle cognition in severe weather have always been the focus and difficulty of intelligent vehicle environment perception. This paper proposes a vehicle cognition method based on radar and infrared thermal camera information fusion in severe weather. The fusion of radar and infrared cameras can greatly enrich the completeness of vehicle cognitive information. First, an attention mechanism based on radar guidance information was proposed to extract the vehicle region of interest (ROI). Unlike the traditional ROI extraction method, this method is not disturbed by the environment and does not need complicated calculations, which can quickly and accurately extract ROI for vehicles. Second, based on ROI information, the infrared thermal image is reconstructed and enhanced, which is of great significance to improve the accuracy of vehicle detection for deep learning. Finally, we propose a vehicle depth estimation method based on pixel regression and use multi-scale cognitive information to fuse radar and image targets. The fusion method considering depth information can reduce target confusion and improve fusion robustness and accuracy, especially when vehicles are adjacent to each other. The experimental results show that the vehicle detection accuracy of this method is 95.2% and the vehicle detection speed is 37 fps, which effectively improves the performance of vehicle detection in severe weather.

Radar observation variables reflect the precipitation amount of strong convective precipitation processes, which accurate forecast is an important difficulty in weather forecasting. Current forecasting methods are mostly based on radar echo extrapolation, which has the insufficiency of input information and the ineffectiveness of model architecture. This paper presents a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory forecasting method for strong convective precipitation based on the attention mechanism and residual neural network (ResNet-Attention-BiLSTM). First, this paper uses ResNet to effectively extract the key information of extreme weather and solves the problem of regression to the mean of the prediction model by learning the residuals of the radar observation data. Second, this paper uses the attention mechanism to adaptively weight the fusion of the features to enhance the extraction of the important features of the precipitation image data. On this basis, this paper presents a novel spatio-temporal reasoning method for radar observations and establishes a precipitation forecasting model, which captures the past and future time-order relationship of the sequence data. Finally, this paper conducts experiments based on the real collected data of a strong convective precipitation process and compares its performance with the existing models, the mean absolute percentage error of this model was reduced by 15.94% (1 km), 18.72% (3 km), and 14.91% (7 km), and the coefficient of determination (\(R^{2}\)) was increased by 10.89% (1 km), 9.61% (3 km), and 9.29% (7 km), which proves the state of the art and effectiveness of this forecasting model.