Indiana University Bloomington

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Technical Report TR622:
Vanishing Point: a Visual Road-Detection Program for a DARPA Grand Challenge Vehicle

Danko Antolovic, Alex Leykin and Steven D. Johnson
(Dec 2005), 6 pages pages
[This work was performed in collaboration with the Indy Robot Racing Team in cooperation with Pervasive Technology Labs at Indiana University.]
Abstract:
This report describes a visual approach to road detection. A field of dominant trend lines is established over the image, by convolution with Gabor filters; the trend lines are then grouped into "visual segments," providing evidence for macroscopic linear features. Sets of these macroscopic features are evaluated against a list of heuristic criteria, to determine their likelihood of representing a road in the image. This procedure was implemented as software, for use by the Indy Robot Racing Team, a participant in the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005. It is capable of road detection at rates appropriate for driving at moderate speeds on dirt roads (ca. 5 Hz on a 3.4 GHz processor).

Supplementary information may also be found at the following URL: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~sjohnson/irrt/img/Antolovic-Leykin-Johnson/

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