A New Method of Unstructured Road Detection Based on HSV Color Space and Road Features

A novel unstructured road detection approach based on HSV color space and road features is proposed. The method mainly uses the Hue component as the estimation standard, for it is insensitive to shadows and water areas. Sometimes, the Hue component of the road may be unstable, so we combine the Saturation and the Value components. This arrangement can assure the robustness of the approach. We don´t deal with all the frame pixels one by one. Instead, we only select some of them. Thus, the processing speed of the method is guaranteed. At last, credible edge points are chosen and then fitted by either straight line or curve. The experiments carried out show that the method detects the lane area effectively, and is robust against noise, shadows, and illumination variations.