Grouping dominant orientations for ill-structured road following

Many rural roads lack sharp, smoothly curving edges and a homogeneous surface appearance, hampering traditional vision-based road-following methods. However, they often have strong texture cues parallel to the road direction in the form of ruts and tracks left by other vehicles. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for following ill-structured roads in which dominant texture orientations computed with multi-scale Gabor wavelet filters vote for a consensus road vanishing point location. In-plane road curvature and out-of-plane undulation are estimated in each image by tracking the vanishing point indicated by a horizontal image strip as it moves up toward the putative vanishing line. Particle filtering is also used to track the vanishing point sequence induced by road curvature from image to image. Results are shown for vanishing point localization on a variety of road scenes ranging from gravel roads to dirt trails to highways.