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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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Zhijie Fang. (2019). Behavior understanding of vulnerable road users by 2D pose estimation (Antonio Lopez, & David Vazquez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians
and cyclists can be critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, therefore, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, i.e. from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this PhD work, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow the established traffic codes to indicate future left/right turns and stop maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed a priori. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian can allow us to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the egovehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this PhD work, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists’ intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the publicly available Daimler and JAAD datasets. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, therefore, we created our own one by acquiring
and annotating corresponding video-sequences which we aim to share with the
research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
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Angel Sappa, Rosa Herrero, Fadi Dornaika, David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2007). Road Approximation in Euclidean and v-Disparity Space: A Comparative Study. In Computer Aided Systems Theory, (Vol. 4739, 1105–1112). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study between two road approximation techniques—planar surfaces—from stereo vision data. The first approach is carried out in the v-disparity space and is based on a voting scheme, the Hough transform. The second one consists in computing the best fitting plane for the whole 3D road data points, directly in the Euclidean space, by using least squares fitting. The comparative study is initially performed over a set of different synthetic surfaces
(e.g., plane, quadratic surface, cubic surface) digitized by a virtual stereo head; then real data obtained with a commercial stereo head are used. The comparative study is intended to be used as a criterion for fining the best technique according to the road geometry. Additionally, it highlights common problems driven from a wrong assumption about the scene’s prior knowledge.
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Angel Sappa, Rosa Herrero, Fadi Dornaika, David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2007). Road Approximation in Euclidean and v-Disparity Space: A Comparative Study. In EUROCAST2007, Workshop on Cybercars and Intelligent Vehicles (368–369).
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study between two road approximation techniques—planar surfaces—from stereo vision data. The first approach is carried out in the v-disparity space and is based on a voting scheme, the Hough transform. The second one consists in computing the best fitting plane for the whole 3D road data points, directly in the Euclidean space, by using least squares fitting. The comparative study is initially performed over a set of different synthetic surfaces
(e.g., plane, quadratic surface, cubic surface) digitized by a virtual stereo head; then real data obtained with a commercial stereo head are used. The comparative study is intended to be used as a criterion for fining the best technique according to the road geometry. Additionally, it highlights common problems driven from a wrong assumption about the scene’s prior knowledge.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Antonio Lopez, & Ramon Baldrich. (2007). Shadow Resistant Road Segmentation from a Mobile Monocular System. In 3rd Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA 2007), J. Marti et al. (Eds.) LNCS 4477:9–16.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Antonio Lopez, & Ramon Baldrich. (2008). Illuminant Invariant Model-Based Road Segmentation. In IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, (1155–1180).
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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, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). 3D Scene Priors for Road Detection. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (57–64).
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important in different areas of computer vision such as autonomous driving, car collision warning and pedestrian crossing detection. However, current vision-based road detection methods are usually based on low-level features and they assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions. Therefore, in this paper, contextual 3D information is used in addition to low-level cues. Low-level photometric invariant cues are derived from the appearance of roads. Contextual cues used include horizon lines, vanishing points, 3D scene layout and 3D road stages. Moreover, temporal road cues are included. All these cues are sensitive to different imaging conditions and hence are considered as weak cues. Therefore, they are combined to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. To this end, the low-level, contextual and temporal cues are combined in a Bayesian framework to classify road sequences. Large scale experiments on road sequences show that the road detection method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios (tunnels, urban and highway). Further, using the combined cues outperforms all other individual cues. Finally, the proposed method provides highest road detection accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: road detection
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Ferran Diego, Jose Manuel Alvarez, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Vision-based road detection via on-line video registration. In 13th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (1135–1140).
Abstract: TB6.2
Road segmentation is an essential functionality for supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as road following and vehicle and pedestrian detection. Significant efforts have been made in order to solve this task using vision-based techniques. The major challenge is to deal with lighting variations and the presence of objects on the road surface. In this paper, we propose a new road detection method to infer the areas of the image depicting road surfaces without performing any image segmentation. The idea is to previously segment manually or semi-automatically the road region in a traffic-free reference video record on a first drive. And then to transfer these regions to the frames of a second video sequence acquired later in a second drive through the same road, in an on-line manner. This is possible because we are able to automatically align the two videos in time and space, that is, to synchronize them and warp each frame of the first video to its corresponding frame in the second one. The geometric transform can thus transfer the road region to the present frame on-line. In order to reduce the different lighting conditions which are present in outdoor scenarios, our approach incorporates a shadowless feature space which represents an image in an illuminant-invariant feature space. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic background subtraction algorithm which removes the regions containing vehicles in the observed frames which are within the transferred road region.
Keywords: video alignment; road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Geographic Information for vision-based Road Detection. In IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (621–626).
Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.
Keywords: road detection
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