A Real-Time Collision Warning System for Autonomous Vehicles Based on YOLOv8n and SGBM Stereo Vision

With the rapid development of autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems, vehicle detection and distance estimation have become critical technologies for ensuring driving safety. However, real-world in-vehicle environments impose strict constraints on computational resources, making it impractical to deploy high-end GPUs. This implies that even highly accurate algorithms, if unable to run in real time on embedded platforms, cannot fully meet practical application demands. Although existing deep learning-based detection and stereo vision methods achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on public datasets, they often rely heavily on massive computational power and large-scale annotated data. Their high computational requirements and limited cross-scenario generalization capabilities restrict their feasibility in real-time vehicle-mounted applications. On the other hand, traditional algorithms such as Semi-Global Block Matching (SGBM) are advantageous in terms of computational efficiency and cross-scenario adaptability, but when used alone, their accuracy and robustness remain insufficient for safety-critical applications. Therefore, the motivation of this study is to develop a stereo vision-based collision warning system that achieves robustness, real-time performance, and computational efficiency. Our method is specifically designed for resource-constrained in-vehicle platforms, integrating a lightweight YOLOv8n detector with SGBM-based depth estimation. This approach enables real-time performance under limited resources, providing a more practical solution compared to conventional deep learning models and offering strong potential for real-world engineering applications.