General-purpose road boundary detection with stereo camera

In this paper, we propose a simple general-purpose road boundary detection method, which can detect low height curbs, curved curbs, slopes, vegetation and ditches. Many conventional methods based on DEM (digital elevation map) can only deal with ordinary curbs because they use step-edge detection on the DEM. The proposed method detects height changes against road surface on several multi-directional scanning lines on a dense disparity map. Therefore it can detect a variety of road boundaries even with smooth edges and jagged boundaries. The experimental results show that our method can detect more kinds of road boundaries.