Road feature extraction using a 2D LMS

In most urban roads, and similar environments such as in the theme parks, campus sites, industrial estates, science parks and the like, the painted lane markings that exist may not be easily discernible by CCD cameras due to poor lighting, bad weather conditions and inadequate maintenance. An important feature of roads in such environments is the existence of pavements or curbs on either side defining the road boundaries. These curbs, which are mostly parallel to the road, can be harnessed to extract useful features of the road for implementing autonomous navigation or driver assistance systems. However, extraction of the curb or road edge feature using vision image data is a difficult task as curbs are not conspicuous in the vision image. To extract the curb from a camera image requires extensive image processing, heuristics and very favorable lighting. In our approach, road curbs are extracted speedily using range data provided by a 2D laser measurement system (LMS). Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the viability, and effectiveness, of the proposed methodology and its robustness to different obstacle, weather and lighting conditions.