Autonomous following of ill‐defined roads is an important part of visual navigation systems. This paper presents an adaptive method that uses a statistical model of the color of the road surface within a trapezoidal shape that approximately corresponds to the projection of the road on the image plane. The method does not perform an explicit segmentation of the images but instead expands the shape sideways until the match between shape and road worsens, simultaneously computing the color statistics. Results show that the method is capable of reactively following roads, at driving speeds typical of the robots used, in a variety of situations while coping with variable conditions of the road such as surface type, puddles, and shadows. We extensively evaluate the proposed method using a large number of datasets with ground truth (available from http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/cs/research/ir/dss/). We moreover evaluate many color spaces in the context of road following, and we find that the color spaces that separate luminance from color information perform best, especially if the luminance information is discarded.
Autonomous following of ill-defined roads is an important part of visual navigation systems. The majority of current image-based road following methods rely on computationally expensive algorithms. This paper presents an adaptive real-time method based on statistical analysis of the colour of a road surface in a trapezoidal shape that corresponds to the projection of the road on the image plane. Our method is capable of navigating in real-time in a variety of situations, including 90?turns and crossroads, and coping with variable conditions of the road such as surface type and shadows
Estimation of visibility is a crucial element of coverage estimation of large, complex environments. This nonprobabilistic problem is often tackled in a 2D context. We present an algorithm that can estimate the visibility of a high resolution scene from a low resolution 3D representation. An octree based voxel representation provides a dataset that is easy to process. Voxel occupancy properties ensure a good approximation of visibilty at high resolution. Our system is capable of producing a reasonable solution to the viewpoint placement issue of the Art gallery problem.
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