Integration Framework of Monocular Vision-Based Drivable Region Detection and Contour-Based Vehicle Localization for Autonomous Driving Systems

Abstract

Perception and localization are the keys in autonomous vehicle systems and driver assistance systems. The perception provides the information of environments around the vehicle, like other vehicles, pedestrians, and road signs. The localization provides the position and heading of vehicle, which can be used for path planning, navigation. With perception and localization process, the safety of vehicle driving could be increased. In this paper, an image segmentation method called region growing, using threshold estimated from previous indicated road region, is proposed to determine that the pixels in the image belong to road region or not. With a defined initial partial road region, the whole road region can be obtained. On the other hand, with a prior birdeye view map of the area where the vehicle drives, the contours of road region extracted from captured images are matching with the contour on the map by iterative closest point to obtain the vehicle position. In addition, in order to increase the precision of matching, the movements of camera are also estimated by matching the contour in consecutive frames. Furthermore, the position estimated from visual information integrated with the information from GPS to obtain more accurate position. Comparing with vision-based localization only, the integration with GPS reduces the weight and influence of bad matching results, which make the estimated position more accurate. The experimental results show that in structured road, with the localization by road signs, stop lines, and lane lines, the global positions of vehicle can be estimated while the relative movements are very close to GPS data.