Detection and tracking of boundary of unmarked roads

Abstract

This paper presents a new method of detecting and tracking the boundaries of drivable regions in road without road-markings. As unmarked roads connect residential places to public roads, the capability of autonomously driving on such a roadway is important to truly realize self-driving cars in daily driving scenarios. To detect the left and right boundaries of drivable regions, our method first examines the image region at the front of ego-vehicle and then uses the appearance information of that region to identify the boundary of the drivable region from input images. Due to variation in the image acquisition condition, the image features necessary for boundary detection may not be present. When this happens, a boundary detection algorithm working frame-by-frame basis would fail to successfully detect the boundaries. To effectively handle these cases, our method tracks, using a Bayes filter, the detected boundaries over frames. Experiments using real-world videos show promising results.