Towards multi-cue urban curb recognition

This paper presents a multi-cue approach to curb recognition in urban traffic. We propose a novel texture-based curb classifier using local receptive field (LRF) features in conjunction with a multi-layer neural network. This classification module operates on both intensity images and on three-dimensional height profile data derived from stereo vision. We integrate the proposed multi-cue curb classifier as an additional measurement module into a state-of-the-art Kaiman filter-based urban lane recognition system. Our experiments involve a challenging real-world dataset captured in urban traffic with manually labeled ground-truth. We quantify the benefit of the proposed multi-cue curb classifier in terms of the improvement in curb localization accuracy of the integrated system. Our results indicate a 25% reduction of the average curb localization error at real-time processing speeds.