Stabilization of Inverse Perspective Mapping Images based on Robust Vanishing Point Estimation

In this work, a new inverse perspective mapping (IPM) technique is proposed based on a robust estimation of the vanishing point, which provide bird-view images of the road, so that facilitating the tasks of road modeling and vehicle detection and tracking. This new approach has been design to cope with the instability that cameras mounted on a moving vehicle suffer. The estimation of the vanishing point relies on a novel and efficient feature extraction strategy, which segmentates the lane markings of the images by combining a histogram-based segmentation with temporal and frequency filtering. Then, the vanishing point of each image is stabilized by means of a temporal filtering along the estimates of previous images. In a last step, the IPM image is computed based on the stabilized vanishing point. Tests have been carried out on several long video sequences captured from cameras inside a vehicle being driven along highways and local roads, with different illumination and weather conditions, presence of shadows, occluding vehicles, and slope changes. Results have shown a significant improvement in terms of lane width constancy and parallelism between lane markings over non-stabilized IPM algorithms.