Adaptive road recognition and ego-state tracking in the presence of obstacles

An approach to road recognition and ego-state tracking in monocular image sequences of traffic scenes is described. The main contribution of this paper is the adaptive recognition scheme, which deals with competitive road hypotheses, and its application in several processing steps of an image sequence analysis system. No manual initialization of the tracked road is required and the change of the road type is allowed. The road parameters to be recognized are the road width, road lane number and road curvature. For exact estimation of road curvature the translational and rotational velocities of the ego-car are assumed to be available. The estimated ego-state parameters are the camera orientation (which is derived due to vanishing point tracking) and the camera position relative to the road center line.