• Journal of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.159-166
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• 2017

The position of autonomous driving vehicle is basically acquired through the global positioning system (GPS). However, GPS signals cannot be received in tunnels. Due to this limitation, localization of autonomous driving vehicles can be made through sensors mounted on them. In particular, a 3D Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system is used for longitudinal position error correction. Few feature points and structures that can be used for localization of vehicles are available in tunnels. Since lanes in the road are normally marked by solid line, it cannot be used to recognize a longitudinal position. In addition, only a small number of structures that are separated from the tunnel walls such as sign boards or jet fans are available. Thus, it is necessary to extract usable information from tunnels to recognize a longitudinal position. In this paper, fire hydrants and evacuation guide lights attached at both sides of tunnel walls were used to recognize a longitudinal position. These structures have highly distinctive reflectivity from the surrounding walls, which can be distinguished using LIDAR reflectivity data. Furthermore, reflectivity information of tunnel walls was fused with the road surface reflectivity map to generate a synthetic reflectivity map. When the synthetic reflectivity map was used, localization of vehicles was able through correlation matching with the local maps generated from the current LIDAR data. The experiments were conducted at an expressway including Maseong Tunnel (approximately 1.5 km long). The experiment results showed that the root mean square (RMS) position errors in lateral and longitudinal directions were 0.19 m and 0.35 m, respectively, exhibiting precise localization accuracy.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.51-71
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• 2014

This paper presents an image enhancement method in real road traffic scenes. The images captured by the camera on the car cannot keep the color constancy as illumination or weather changes. In the real environment, these problems are more worse at back light conditions and at night that make more difficult to the applications of the vision-based intelligent vehicles. Using the existing image enhancement methods without considering the position and intensity of the light source and their geometric relations the image quality can even be deteriorated. Thus, this paper presents a fast and effective method for image enhancement resembling human cognitive system which consists of 1) image preprocessing, 2) color-contrast evaluation, 3) alpha blending of over/under estimated image and preprocessed image. An input image is first preprocessed by gamma correction, and then enhanced by an Automatic Color Enhancement(ACE) method. Finally, the preprocessed image and the ACE image are blended to improve image visibility. The proposed method shows drastically enhanced results visually, and improves the performance in traffic sign detection of the vision based intelligent vehicle applications.