Traffic cone detection and localization in TechX Challenge 2013

This paper presents the detection and localization methods of entrance and staircase markers for the team E-Mobile in TechX Challenge 2013. Autonomous vehicles are required to detect and locate traffic cones beside the indoor entrance and staircase. One big challenge is from the unpredictable lighting conditions and environment. Different practical techniques such as color space selection, segmentation, shape analysis, distance estimation, and detector training are combined to obtain good detection rate and localization accuracy. The proposed methods can achieve satisfactory performance in real-world experiments.