Making Bertha See

With the market introduction of the 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicle equipped with a stereo camera system, autonomous driving has become a reality, at least in low speed highway scenarios. This raises hope for a fast evolution of autonomous driving that also extends to rural and urban traffic situations. In August 2013, an S-Class vehicle with close-to-production sensors drove completely autonomously for about 100 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, following the well-known historic Bertha Benz Memorial Route. Next-generation stereo vision was the main sensing component and as such formed the basis for the indispensable comprehensive understanding of complex traffic situations, which are typical for narrow European villages. This successful experiment has proved both the maturity and the significance of machine vision for autonomous driving. This paper presents details of the employed vision algorithms for object recognition and tracking, free-space analysis, traffic light recognition, lane recognition, as well as self-localization.