Reconstruction of the road plane with an embedded stereo-rig in urban environments

We present in this article an original method to reconstruct the road in the specific context of urban environment thanks to the data provided by an uncalibrated stereo-vision system. The method consists on extracting then tracking features (points, lines) from the road and estimate the homography induced by the plane between two poses. The purposed method copes with the dense traffic conditions: the free space required (first ten meters in front of the vehicle) is slightly equivalent to the security distance between two vehicles. Experimental issues from real data are presented and discussed