System approach for multi-purpose representations of traffic scene elements

A major step towards intelligent vehicles lies in the acquisition of an environmental representation of sufficient generality to serve as the basis for a multitude of different assistance-relevant tasks. This acquisition process must reliably cope with the variety of environmental changes inherent to traffic environments. As a step towards this goal, we present our most recent integrated system performing object detection in challenging environments (e.g., inner-city or heavy rain). The system integrates unspecific and vehicle-specific methods for the detection of traffic scene elements, thus creating multiple object hypotheses. Each detection method is modulated by optimized models of typical scene context features which are used to enhance and suppress hypotheses. A multi-object tracking and fusion process is applied to make the produced hypotheses spatially and temporally coherent. In extensive evaluations we show that the presented system successfully analyzes scene elements under diverse conditions, including challenging weather and changing scenarios. We demonstrate that the used generic hypothesis representations allow successful application to a variety of tasks including object detection, movement estimation, and risk assessment by time-to-contact evaluation.