Robust obstacle detection with monocular vision based on motion analysis

This paper deals with the problem of obstacle detection from a single camera mounted on a vehicle. We define an obstacle as any object that obstructs the vehicle´s driving path. The perception of the environment is performed through a fast processing of image sequence. The approach is based on motion analysis. Generally, the optical flow techniques are huge in computation time and sensitive to vehicle motion. To overcome these problems, we choose to detect the obstacle in two steps. The road motion is firstly computed through a fast and robust wavelets analysis. Then, we detect the areas which have a different motion thanks to a Bayesian modelization. Results shown in the paper prove that the proposed method permits the detection of any obstacle on a road.