A monocular vision system for autonomous vehicle guidance

The improvement of vehicle security is a major priority of the car industry. Both active and passive security-systems have experienced a great development during the last decade, but the main research is still focused on minimising the errors committed by the driver rather than trying to avoid them. In this paper, a basic monocular vision system, focused on road location solely, is described. Working with only one video camera hinders the exact 3D reconstruction of the scene: no information about distances and dimensions is available, unless a priori artificial constraints are taken. The problem increases because of the movement of the camera with respect to the scene. In the present system, the road searching and following algorithms operate on the two-dimensional image plane, and 2D to 3D conversion is not accomplished. The system obtains excellent final results, succeeding in more than 75% of the analysed images from the tested sequences