• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.199-205
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• 2011

This paper presents an algorithm capable of detecting free space for the autonomous vehicle navigation. The algorithm consists of two main steps: 1) estimation of longitudinal profile of road, 2) detection of free space. The estimation of longitudinal profile of road is detection of v-line in v-disparity image which is corresponded to road slope, using v-disparity image and hough transform, Dijkstra algorithm. To detect free space, we detect u-line in u-disparity image which is a boundary line between free space and obstacle's region, using u-disparity image and dynamic programming. Free space is decided by detected v-line and u-line. The proposed algorithm is proven to be successful through experiments under various traffic scenarios.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.51-58
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• 2022

Drivable area detection, one of the main functions of advanced driver assistance systems, means detecting an area where a vehicle can safely drive. The drivable area detection is closely related to the safety of the driver and it requires high accuracy with real-time operation. To satisfy these conditions, V-disparity-based method is widely used to detect a drivable area by calculating the road disparity value in each row of an image. However, the V-disparity-based method can falsely detect a non-road area as a road when the disparity value is not accurate or the disparity value of the object is equal to the disparity value of the road. In a road environment including vegetation, such as a highway and a country road, the vegetation area may be falsely detected as the drivable area because the disparity characteristics of the vegetation are similar to those of the road. Therefore, this paper proposes a drivable area detection method and hardware architecture with a high accuracy in road environments including vegetation areas by reducing the number of false detections caused by V-disparity characteristic. When 289 images provided by KITTI road dataset are used to evaluate the road detection performance of the proposed method, it shows an accuracy of 90.12% and a recall of 97.96%. In addition, when the proposed hardware architecture is implemented on the FPGA platform, it uses 8925 slice registers and 7066 slice LUTs.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.18B no.5
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• pp.255-264
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a forward vehicle detection algorithm using column detection and bird's-eye view mapping based on stereo vision. The algorithm can detect forward vehicles robustly in real complex traffic situations. The algorithm consists of the three steps, namely road feature-based column detection, bird's-eye view mapping-based obstacle segmentation, obstacle area remerging and vehicle verification. First, we extract a road feature using maximum frequent values in v-disparity map. And we perform a column detection using the road feature as a new criterion. The road feature is more appropriate criterion than the median value because it is not affected by a road traffic situation, for example the changing of obstacle size or the number of obstacles. But there are still multiple obstacles in the obstacle areas. Thus, we perform a bird's-eye view mapping-based obstacle segmentation to divide obstacle accurately. We can segment obstacle easily because a bird's-eye view mapping can represent the position of obstacle on planar plane using depth map and camera information. Additionally, we perform obstacle area remerging processing because a segmented obstacle area may be same obstacle. Finally, we verify the obstacles whether those are vehicles or not using a depth map and gray image. We conduct experiments to prove the vehicle detection performance by applying our algorithm to real complex traffic situations.