3D line reconstruction of a road environment using an in-vehicle camera

Abstract

This paper describes a method for reconstructing 3D straight lines in the road environment from an image sequence captured by an in-vehicle camera. An actual road environment includes many straight lines such as edges of buildings, utility poles and road markings. These 3D lines can be used effectively for understanding the road scene; our proposed method, therefore, aims to reconstruct the 3D lines using an in-vehicle camera. The camera motion and the 3D line parameters are estimated simultaneously by minimizing the reprojection errors of corresponding edge segments in the image sequence. In the road environment, a forward-looking in-vehicle camera has difficultly in establishing a large parallax for accurate estimation of parameters. The accuracy in estimating parameters is improved by using constraints defined on the basis of a general knowledge of the structures. In experiments on an actual road environment, the camera motion and the 3D line parameters have been estimated from detected edge segments. The accuracy of the 3D lines was evaluated by comparing the estimated position and reference positions. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.