This article proposes an improved lane detection and tracking method for autonomous vehicle applications. In real applications, when the pose and position of the camera are changed, parameters and thresholds in the algorithms need fine adjustment. In order to improve adaptability to different perspective conditions, a width-adaptive lane detection method is proposed. As a useful reference to reduce noises, vanishing point is widely applied in lane detection studies. However, vanishing point detection based on original image consumes many calculation resources. In order to improve the calculation efficiency for real-time applications, we proposed a simplified vanishing point detection method. In the feature extraction step, a scan-line method is applied to detect lane ridge features, the width threshold of which is set automatically based on lane tracking. With clustering, validating, and model fitting, lane candidates are obtained from the basic ridge features. A lane-voted vanishing point is obtained by the simplified grid-based method, then applied to filter out noises. Finally, a multi-lane tracking Kalman filter is applied, the confirmed lines of which also provide adaptive width threshold for ridge feature extraction. Real-road experimental results based on our intelligent vehicle testbed proved the validity and robustness of the proposed method.
Real-time vehicle localization (i.e., position and orientation estimation in the world coordinate system) with high accuracy is the fundamental function of an intelligent vehicle (IV) system. In the process of commercialization of IVs, many car manufacturers attempt to avoid high-cost sensor systems (e.g., RTK GNSS and LiDAR) in favor of low-cost optical sensors such as cameras. The same cost-saving strategy also gives rise to an increasing number of vehicles equipped with High Definition (HD) maps. Rooted upon these existing technologies, this article presents the concept of Monocular Localization with Vector HD Map (MLVHM), a novel camera-based map-matching method that efficiently aligns semantic-level geometric features in-camera acquired frames against the vector HD map in order to achieve high-precision vehicle absolute localization with minimal cost. The semantic features are delicately chosen for the ease of map vector alignment as well as for the resiliency against occlusion and fluctuation in illumination. The effective data association method in MLVHM serves as the basis for the camera position estimation by minimizing feature re-projection errors, and the frame-to-frame motion fusion is further introduced for reliable localization results. Experiments have shown that MLVHM can achieve high-precision vehicle localization with an RMSE of 24 cm with no cumulative error. In addition, we use low-cost on-board sensors and light-weight HD maps to achieve or even exceed the accuracy of existing map-matching algorithms.
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