A stereovision based approach for detecting and tracking lane and forward obstacles on mobile devices

This paper presents SmartCoDrive, an Android application which performs driving assistance functions: 3D lane detection and tracking, forward obstacle detection, obstacle tracking. With this mobile application we wish to increase the adoption rate of driving assistance systems and to provide a viable and cheap solution for every driver, that will be able to use his own tablet or smartphone as a personal driving assistant. The mobile application is deployed on a tablet equipped with dual back-facing cameras. The visual information from the two cameras, along with the data received from the Controller Area Network bus of the vehicle enable a thorough understanding of the 3D environment. First, we develop the sparse 3D reconstruction algorithm. Then, using monocular vision we perform lane markings detection. Obstacle detection is done by combining the superpixel segmentation with 3D information and the tracking algorithm is based on the Kalman Filter. Since the processing capabilities of the mobile platforms are limited, different optimizations are carried out in order to obtain a real-time implementation. The Android application may be used in urban traffic that is characterized by low-speed and short-medium distances to obstacles.