Road edge detection for mobile robot navigation

The authors describe a novel algorithm for the detection of road edges in image sequences for mobile robot navigation. The essence of this algorithm is road modeling by spline functions and edge detection by a linear recursive filter. The filter uses a measurement procedure that involves an edge point search about a specified reference curve. This curve is determined automatically by preprocessing the first frame. Estimates of the road edges in each frame are used as the reference curve for the following frame. The algorithm processes a sequence of road images, and it does not require a priori knowledge about the image contents. The algorithm has been tested on image sequences, yielding satisfactory results