Fusing Geometry and Appearance for Road Segmentation

We propose a novel method for fusing geometric and appearance cues for road surface segmentation. Modeling colour cues using Gaussian mixtures allows the fusion to be performed optimally within a Bayesian framework, avoiding ad hoc weights. Adaptation to different scene conditions is accomplished through nearest-neighbour appearance model selection over a dictionary of mixture models learned from training data, and the thorny problem of selecting the number of components in each mixture is solved through a novel cross-validation approach. Quantitative evaluation reveals that the proposed fusion method significantly improves segmentation accuracy relative to a method that uses geometric cues alone.