Real time system for road following and obstacle detection

Path planning of a vehicle running in a structured environment requires road boundaries evaluation for mapping its position and reducing the search area for obstacle detection. This paper describes a real time system that has been developed in the framework of the EUREKA PROMETHEUS European project and is presently under test on a Mobile Laboratory (MOBLAB). The road boundaries are detected by highlighting the large homogeneous region that lies in the bottom of the image, in front of the vehicle. Edge detection, local thresholding and morphological filtering techniques are used to define this region. Its boundaries are tracked in the sequence, relying on hypotheses of continuity of color and shape of the road to overcome drawbacks due to shadows, intersections, hidden boundaries. The proposed technique has been implemented on an integrated system based on a real time imaging processor and a workstation.