Simple road detection based on vanishing point

摘要

Vision-based road detection is one of the key techniques of autonomous driving, intelligent vehicles, and visual navigation. At present, methods based on vanishing point perform best with general roads. However, it is difficult for them to meet the needs of a real-time system due to high time consumption. This paper presents a fast detection method, namely simple road detection, which achieves high efficiency by employing sky segmentation and two new optimization schemes-sample convolution and fast voting. The optimizations are based on lookup tables, sample computing, and computing simplification. The interval sampling in sample convolution makes the proposed method flexible to meet various efficiency and accuracy demands by different sample-step values. Mean filter and vote orientation limitation are also proposed to help improve detection accuracy. Experiments have been conducted with a large number of road images under different environmental conditions, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method is efficient and effective in detecting both structured and unstructured roads.