• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.36 no.6
• /
• pp.968-978
• /
• 2014

Autonomous vehicle technology based on information technology and software will lead the automotive industry in the near future. Vehicle localization technology is a core expertise geared toward developing autonomous vehicles and will provide location information for control and decision. This paper proposes an effective vision-based localization technology to be applied to autonomous vehicles. In particular, the proposed technology makes use of numerical maps that are widely used in the field of geographic information systems and that have already been built in advance. Optimum vehicle ego-motion estimation and road marking feature extraction techniques are adopted and then combined by an extended Kalman filter and particle filter to make up the localization technology. The implementation results of this paper show remarkable results; namely, an 18 ms mean processing time and 10 cm location error. In addition, autonomous driving and parking are successfully completed with an unmanned vehicle within a $300m{\times}500m$ space.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.188-199
• /
• 2013

This paper presents a novel algorithm for nighttime detection of the lane markers painted on a road at night. First of all, the proposed algorithm uses neighborhood average filtering, 8-directional Sobel operator and thresholding segmentation based on OTSU's to handle raw lane images taken from a digital CCD camera. Secondly, combining intensity map and gradient map, we analyze the distribution features of pixels on boundaries of lanes in the nighttime and construct 4 feature sets for these points, which are helpful to supply with sufficient data related to lane boundaries to detect lane markers much more robustly. Then, the searching method in multiple directions- horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions, is conducted to eliminate the noise points on lane boundaries. Adapted Hough transformation is utilized to obtain the feature parameters related to the lane edge. The proposed algorithm can not only significantly improve detection performance for the lane marker, but it requires less computational power. Finally, the algorithm is proved to be reliable and robust in lane detection in a nighttime scenario.