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Antonio Lopez, Joan Serrat, Cristina Cañero, Felipe Lumbreras, & T. Graf. (2010). Robust lane markings detection and road geometry computation. IJAT - International Journal of Automotive Technology, 11(3), 395–407.
Abstract: Detection of lane markings based on a camera sensor can be a low-cost solution to lane departure and curve-over-speed warnings. A number of methods and implementations have been reported in the literature. However, reliable detection is still an issue because of cast shadows, worn and occluded markings, variable ambient lighting conditions, for example. We focus on increasing detection reliability in two ways. First, we employed an image feature other than the commonly used edges: ridges, which we claim addresses this problem better. Second, we adapted RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane lines to the image features, based on both ridgeness and ridge orientation. In addition, the model was fitted for the left and right lane lines simultaneously to enforce a consistent result. Four measures of interest for driver assistance applications were directly computed from the fitted parametric model at each frame: lane width, lane curvature, and vehicle yaw angle and lateral offset with regard the lane medial axis. We qualitatively assessed our method in video sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. We also quantitatively assessed it on synthetic but realistic video sequences for which road geometry and vehicle trajectory ground truth are known.
Keywords: lane markings
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Jose Manuel Alvarez. (2010). Combining Context and Appearance for Road Detection (Antonio Lopez, & Theo Gevers, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Road Detection Based on Illuminant Invariance. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 12(1), 184–193.
Abstract: By using an onboard camera, it is possible to detect the free road surface ahead of the ego-vehicle. Road detection is of high relevance for autonomous driving, road departure warning, and supporting driver-assistance systems such as vehicle and pedestrian detection. The key for vision-based road detection is the ability to classify image pixels as belonging or not to the road surface. Identifying road pixels is a major challenge due to the intraclass variability caused by lighting conditions. A particularly difficult scenario appears when the road surface has both shadowed and nonshadowed areas. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach to vision-based road detection that is robust to shadows. The novelty of our approach relies on using a shadow-invariant feature space combined with a model-based classifier. The model is built online to improve the adaptability of the algorithm to the current lighting and the presence of other vehicles in the scene. The proposed algorithm works in still images and does not depend on either road shape or temporal restrictions. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on real-world road sequences with heavy traffic and shadows show that the method is robust to shadows and lighting variations. Moreover, the proposed method provides the highest performance when compared with hue-saturation-intensity (HSI)-based algorithms.
Keywords: road detection
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Fadi Dornaika, Jose Manuel Alvarez, Angel Sappa, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). A New Framework for Stereo Sensor Pose through Road Segmentation and Registration. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 12(4), 954–966.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for real-time estimation of the onboard stereo head's position and orientation relative to the road surface, which is required for any advanced driver-assistance application. This framework can be used with all road types: highways, urban, etc. Unlike existing works that rely on feature extraction in either the image domain or 3-D space, we propose a framework that directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs' brightness. The proposed approach consists of two stages that are invoked for every stereo frame. The first stage segments the road region in one monocular view. The second stage estimates the camera pose using a featureless registration between the segmented monocular road region and the other view in the stereo pair. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution combines a road segmentation algorithm with a registration technique to estimate the online stereo camera pose. The second contribution solves the registration using a featureless method, which is carried out using two different optimization techniques: 1) the differential evolution algorithm and 2) the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. We provide experiments and evaluations of performance. The results presented show the validity of our proposed framework.
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, Ferran Diego, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Road Geometry Classification by Adaptative Shape Models. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 14(1), 459–468.
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important for different applications in transportation, such as autonomous driving, vehicle collision warning, and pedestrian crossing detection. Common approaches to road detection are based on low-level road appearance (e.g., color or texture) and neglect of the scene geometry and context. Hence, using only low-level features makes these algorithms highly depend on structured roads, road homogeneity, and lighting conditions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to classify road geometries for road detection through the analysis of scene composition and temporal coherence. Road geometry classification is proposed by building corresponding models from training images containing prototypical road geometries. We propose adaptive shape models where spatial pyramids are steered by the inherent spatial structure of road images. To reduce the influence of lighting variations, invariant features are used. Large-scale experiments show that the proposed road geometry classifier yields a high recognition rate of 73.57% ± 13.1, clearly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. Including road shape information improves road detection results over existing appearance-based methods. Finally, it is shown that invariant features and temporal information provide robustness against disturbing imaging conditions.
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Y. LeCun, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2012). Semantic Road Segmentation via Multi-Scale Ensembles of Learned Features. In 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations (Vol. 7584, pp. 586–595). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Antonio Lopez, Theo Gevers, & Felipe Lumbreras. (2014). Combining Priors, Appearance and Context for Road Detection. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(3), 1168–1178.
Abstract: Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.
Keywords: Illuminant invariance; lane markings; road detection; road prior; road scene understanding; vanishing point; 3-D scene layout
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Evaluating Color Representation for Online Road Detection. In ICCV Workshop on Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: From Earth to Mars (pp. 594–595).
Abstract: Detecting traversable road areas ahead a moving vehicle is a key process for modern autonomous driving systems. Most existing algorithms use color to classify pixels as road or background. These algorithms reduce the effect of lighting variations and weather conditions by exploiting the discriminant/invariant properties of different color representations. However, up to date, no comparison between these representations have been conducted. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an evaluation of existing color representations for road detection. More specifically, we focus on color planes derived from RGB data and their most com-
mon combinations. The evaluation is done on a set of 7000 road images acquired
using an on-board camera in different real-driving situations.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, & Antonio Lopez. (2008). Novel Index for Objective Evaluation of Road Detection Algorithms. In Intelligent Transportation Systems. 11th International IEEE Conference on, (815–820).
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Jose Manuel Alvarez. (2007). On-Board Road Surface Segmentation.
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