Following Dirt Roads at Night Time: Sensors and Features for Lane Recognition and Tracking
The robust perception of roads is a major prerequisite in many Advanced Driver Assistant Systems such as Lane Departure Warning and Lane Keeping Assistant Systems. While road detection at day time is a well known topic in literature, few publications provide a detailed description about handling the lack of day light. In this paper we present multiple sensors and features for perceiving roads at day and night. The presented features are evaluated according to their quality for road detection. We generated a large number of labeled sample data and extracted the quality of the features from their probability distributions. The challenge of tracking an unmarked road under bad lighting conditions is demonstrated by comparing receiver operating characteristics (ROC) of the features at day and night time. Based on these results we present a road tracking system capable of tracking unmarked roads of lower order regardless of illumination conditions. Practical tests prove the robustness up to unmarked dirt roads under different weather conditions.
IROS 2015