Accurate Vertical Road Profile Estimation Using v-Disparity Map and Dynamic Programming

Abstract

Detecting obstacles on the road is crucial for the advanced driver assistance systems. Obstacle detection on the road can be greatly facilitated if we have a vertical road profile. Therefore, in this paper, we present a novel method that can estimate an accurate vertical road profile of the scene from the stereo images. Unlike conventional stereo-based road profile estimation methods that heavily rely on a parametric model of the road surface, our method can obtain a road profile for an arbitrary complicated road. To this end, an energy function that includes the stereo matching fidelity and spatio-temporal smoothness of the road profile is presented, and thus the road profile is extracted by maximizing the energy function via dynamic programming. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.