Vision-based Safe Maneuvers with Detection of 10cm Height Obstacles
C VestriI, Dzmitry Tsishkou, Frédéric Abad, S Wybo, Sylvain Bougnoux, Remy Bendahan · 17th ITS World CongressITS JapanITS AmericaERTICO · 2010
An increasing number of new vehicles are being equipped with parking and backing-up assistant systems. Those systems both help the driver in conducting difficult maneuvers and in detecting the presence of obstacles to prevent collisions. The authors present a stereovision system that detects and monitors obstacles inside a 6m area in front or behind a vehicle. They use wide-angle cameras to detect side-appearing obstacles. The aim is at detecting pedestrian and cars, but also curbs, stopping blocks and small rocks which are ignored by most of other systems. This paper presents the low height obstacle (about 10cm) detection algorithm used in this system. The biggest challenge is to separate those obstacles from ground surface because the height variation with the ground is small and they correspond to very few pixels in the image (mainly with wide angle camera). The authors have developed a real-time wide angle stereo algorithm which detects obstacles in three stages: first, a plane that approximates the ground surface separates main obstacles such as pedestrians and cars from the ground. Second, a specific algorithm detects low height obstacles and small (10cm*10cm) objects by searching for small height transitions on the ground surface. Third, a free-space algorithm gathers information to compute the area where a vehicle can safely drive. The low height obstacle detection algorithm is the main contribution of the paper. The authors show detection results under typical urban situations and evaluate its detection rate. Drivable surface is correctly marked and low height obstacles are detected up to 6 meters.