Night time road curvature estimation based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Detecting the road geometry at night time is an essential precondition to provide optimal illumination for the driver and the other traffic participants. In this paper we propose a novel approach to estimate the current road curvature based on three sensors: A far infrared camera, a near infrared camera and an imaging radar sensor. Various Convolutional Neural Networks with different configuration are trained for each input. By fusing the classifier responses of all three sensors, a further performance gain is achieved. To annotate the training and evaluation dataset without costly human interaction a fully automatic curvature annotation algorithm based on inertial navigation system is presented as well.