Despite rapid developments in visual image-based road detection, robustly identifying road areas in visual images remains challenging due to issues like illumination changes and blurry images. To this end, LiDAR sensor data can be incorporated to improve the visual image-based road detection, because LiDAR data is less susceptible to visual noises. However, the main difficulty in introducing LiDAR information into visual image-based road detection is that LiDAR data and its extracted features do not share the same space with the visual data and visual features. Such gaps in spaces may limit the benefits of LiDAR information for road detection. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel Progressive LiDAR adaptation-aided road detection &#x0028 PLARD &#x0029 approach to adapt LiDAR information into visual image-based road detection and improve detection performance. In PLARD, progressive LiDAR adaptation consists of two subsequent modules: 1 &#x0029 data space adaptation, which transforms the LiDAR data to the visual data space to align with the perspective view by applying altitude difference-based transformation; and 2 &#x0029 feature space adaptation, which adapts LiDAR features to visual features through a cascaded fusion structure. Comprehensive empirical studies on the well-known KITTI road detection benchmark demonstrate that PLARD takes advantage of both the visual and LiDAR information, achieving much more robust road detection even in challenging urban scenes. In particular, PLARD outperforms other state-of-the-art road detection models and is currently top of the publicly accessible benchmark leader-board.
 As most of the object tracking algorithms predict bounding boxes to cover the target, pixel-level tracking methods provide a better description of the target. However, it remains challenging for a tracker to precisely identify detailed foreground areas of the target. In this work, we propose a novel bi-channel fully convolutional neural network to tackle the generic pixel-level object tracking problem. By capturing and fusing both low-level and high-level temporal information, our network is able to produce pixel-level foreground mask of the target accurately. In particular, our model neither updates parameters to fit the tracked target nor requires prior knowledge about the category of the target. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves compelling performance on challenging videos in comparison with competitive tracking algorithms. Advanced information and communication technologies can be used to facilitate traffic incident management. If an incident is detected and blocks a road link, in order to reduce the incident-induced traffic congestion, a dynamic strategy to deliver incident information to selected drivers and help them make detours in urban areas is proposed by this work. Time-dependent shortest path algorithms are used to generate a subnetwork where vehicles should receive such information. A simulation approach based on an extended cell transmission model is used to describe traffic flow in urban networks where path information and traffic flow at downstream road links are well modeled. Simulation results reveal the influences of some major parameters of an incident-induced congestion dissipation process such as the ratio of route-changing vehicles to the total vehicles, operation time interval of the proposed strategy, traffic density in the traffic network, and the scope of the area where traffic incident information is delivered. The results can be used to improve the state of the art in preventing urban road traffic congestion caused by incidents. Current two-stage object detectors, which consists of a region proposal stage and a refinement stage, may produce unreliable results due to ill-localized proposed regions. To address this problem, we propose a context refinement algorithm that explores rich contextual information to better refine each proposed region. In particular, we first identify neighboring regions that may contain useful contexts and then perform refinement based on the extracted and unified contextual information. In practice, our method effectively improves the quality of the final detection results as well as region proposals. Empirical studies show that context refinement yields substantial and consistent improvements over different baseline detectors. Moreover, the proposed algorithm brings around 3 performance gain on PASCAL VOC benchmark and around 6 gain on MS COCO benchmark respectively. We propose an approach to detect drivable road area in monocular images. It is a self-supervised approach which doesn't require any human road annotations on images to train the road detection algorithm. Our approach reduces human labeling effort and makes training scalable. We combine the best of both supervised and unsupervised methods in our approach. First, we automatically generate training road annotations for images using OpenStreetMap1, vehicle pose estimation sensors, and camera parameters. Next, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for road detection using these annotations. We show that we are able to generate reasonably accurate training annotations in KITTI data-set [1]. We achieve state-of-the-art performance among the methods which do not require human annotation effort.  In this paper, a Deep Learning system for accurate road detection is proposed using the ResNet-101 network with a fully convolutional architecture and multiple upscaling steps for image interpolation. It is demonstrated that significant generalization gains in the learning process are attained by randomly generating augmented training data using several geometric transformations and pixelwise changes, such as affine and perspective transformations, mirroring, image cropping, distortions, blur, noise, and color changes. In addition, this paper shows that the use of a 4-step upscaling strategy provides optimal learning results as compared to other similar techniques that perform data upscaling based on shallow layers with scarce representation of the scene data. The complete system is trained and tested on data from the KITTI benchmark and besides it is also tested on images recorded on the Campus of the University of Alcala (Spain). The improvement attained after performing data augmentation and conducting a number of training variants is really encouraging, showing the path to follow for enhanced learning generalization of road detection systems with a view to real deployment in self-driving cars. Given a single image of an arbitrary road, that may not be well-paved, or have clearly delineated edges, or some a priori known color or texture distribution, is it possible for a computer to find this road? This paper addresses this question by decomposing the road detection process into two steps: the estimation of the vanishing point associated with the main (straight) part of the road, followed by the segmentation of the corresponding road area based on the detected vanishing point. The main technical contributions of the proposed approach are a novel adaptive soft voting scheme based on variable-sized voting region using confidence-weighted Gabor filters, which compute the dominant texture orientation at each pixel, and a new vanishing-point-constrained edge detection technique for detecting road boundaries. The proposed method has been implemented, and experiments with 1003 general road images demonstrate that it is both computationally efficient and effective at detecting road regions in challenging conditions. Road detection is a key task for autonomous land vehicles. Monocular vision-based road-detection algorithms are mostly based on machine learning approaches and are usually cast as classification problems. However, the pixel-wise classifiers are faced with the ambiguity caused by changes in road appearance, illumination and weather. An effective way to reduce the ambiguity is to model the contextual information with structured learning and prediction. Currently, the widely used structured prediction model in road detection is the Markov random field or conditional random field. However, the random field-based methods require additional complex optimization after pixel-wise classification, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we present a structured random forest-based road-detection algorithm which is capable of modelling the contextual information efficiently. By mapping the structured label space to a discrete label space, the test function of each split node can be trained i... We present a robust and real time approach to lane marker detection in urban streets. It is based on generating a top view of the road, filtering using selective oriented Gaussian filters, using RANSAC line fitting to give initial guesses to a new and fast RANSAC algorithm for fitting Bezier Splines, which is then followed by a post-processing step. Our algorithm can detect all lanes in still images of the street in various conditions, while operating at a rate of 50 Hz and achieving comparable results to previous techniques. Lane detection is a fundamental aspect of most current advanced driver assistance systems U+0028 ADASs U+0029. A large number of existing results focus on the study of vision-based lane detection methods due to the extensive knowledge background and the low-cost of camera devices. In this paper, previous vision-based lane detection studies are reviewed in terms of three aspects, which are lane detection algorithms, integration, and evaluation methods. Next, considering the inevitable limitations that exist in the camera-based lane detection system, the system integration methodologies for constructing more robust detection systems are reviewed and analyzed. The integration methods are further divided into three levels, namely, algorithm, system, and sensor. Algorithm level combines different lane detection algorithms while system level integrates other object detection systems to comprehensively detect lane positions. Sensor level uses multi-modal sensors to build a robust lane recognition system. In view of the complexity of evaluating the detection system, and the lack of common evaluation procedure and uniform metrics in past studies, the existing evaluation methods and metrics are analyzed and classified to propose a better evaluation of the lane detection system. Next, a comparison of representative studies is performed. Finally, a discussion on the limitations of current lane detection systems and the future developing trends toward an Artificial Society, Computational experiment-based parallel lane detection framework is proposed. Road detection is an important problem with application to driver assistance systems and autonomous, self-guided vehicles. The focus of this paper is on the problem of feature extraction and classification for front-view road detection. Specifically, we propose using Support Vector Machines (SVM) for road detection and effective approach for self-supervised online learning. The proposed road detection algorithm is capable of automatically updating the training data for online training which reduces the possibility of misclassifying road and non-road classes and improves the adaptability of the road detection algorithm. The algorithm presented here can also be seen as a novel framework for self-supervised online learning in the application of classification-based road detection algorithm on intelligent vehicle. In this work we propose a hierarchical approach for labeling semantic objects and regions in scenes. Our approach is reminiscent of early vision literature in that we use a decomposition of the image in order to encode relational and spatial information. In contrast to much existing work on structured prediction for scene understanding, we bypass a global probabilistic model and instead directly train a hierarchical inference procedure inspired by the message passing mechanics of some approximate inference procedures in graphical models. This approach mitigates both the theoretical and empirical difficulties of learning probabilistic models when exact inference is intractable. In particular, we draw from recent work in machine learning and break the complex inference process into a hierarchical series of simple machine learning subproblems. Each subproblem in the hierarchy is designed to capture the image and contextual statistics in the scene. This hierarchy spans coarse-to-fine regions and explicitly models the mixtures of semantic labels that may be present due to imperfect segmentation. To avoid cascading of errors and overfitting, we train the learning problems in sequence to ensure robustness to likely errors earlier in the inference sequence and leverage the stacking approach developed by Motion planning is one of the most significant technologies for autonomous driving. To make motion planning models able to learn from the environment and to deal with emergency situations, a new motion planning framework called as &#x201C parallel planning &#x201D is proposed in this paper. In order to generate sufficient and various training samples, artificial traffic scenes are firstly constructed based on the knowledge from the reality. A deep planning model which combines a convolutional neural network &#x0028 CNN &#x0029 with the Long Short-Term Memory module &#x0028 LSTM &#x0029 is developed to make planning decisions in an end-to-end mode. This model can learn from both real and artificial traffic scenes and imitate the driving style of human drivers. Moreover, a parallel deep reinforcement learning approach is also presented to improve the robustness of planning model and reduce the error rate. To handle emergency situations, a hybrid generative model including a variational auto-encoder &#x0028 VAE &#x0029 and a generative adversarial network &#x0028 GAN &#x0029 is utilized to learn from virtual emergencies generated in artificial traffic scenes. While an autonomous vehicle is moving, the hybrid generative model generates multiple video clips in parallel, which correspond to different potential emergency scenarios. Simultaneously, the deep planning model makes planning decisions for both virtual and current real scenes. The final planning decision is determined by analysis of real observations. Leveraging the parallel planning approach, the planner is able to make rational decisions without heavy calculation burden when an emergency occurs. We introduce an approach to image-based road detection that exploits the availability of unannotated training images to learn an appearance model. Our approach allows us to remove the standard assumption that the lower part of the input image belongs to the road surface, which does not always hold and often yields strongly biased appearance models. Instead, we exploit this assumption in the training images, which yields a much more general appearance model. We then use the learned model to classify the pixels of an input image as road or background without requiring any assumptions about this image. Our experimental evaluation shows the benefits of our approach over existing methods in challenging real-world driving scenarios.