A robust and adaptive road following algorithm for video image sequence

Abstract

Two-dimension road following is one of the crucial tasks of vision navigation. For the reasons of environment complexity and the discrepancy between motion images, the robust outdoor road following for two-dimension image sequence is still a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel road following method, which firstly uses the Mean Shift algorithm with embedded edge confidence to partition the images into homogenous regions with precise boundary. Then, according to the color statistic information of the road/non-road model obtained from previous frames, the Graph Cuts (GC) algorithm is used to achieve the final binary images and update the road/non-road model simultaneously. This algorithm combines the advantages of Graph Cuts algorithm and Mean Shift algorithm, and effectively solves some difficult problems of conventional methods, such as the adaptive selection of road model under complex environments, and the choice of effective criteria for the region merging. Experiment results indicate our method possesses excellent performance under complicated environment, and meets the requirements of fast computing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.