Robust road detection from a single image using road shape prior

Many road detection algorithms require pre-learned information, which may be unreliable as the road scene is usually unexpectable. Single image based (i.e., without any pre-learned information) road detection techniques can be adopted to overcome this problem, while their robustness needs improving. To achieve robust road detection from a single image, this paper proposes a general road shape prior to enforce the detected region to be road-shaped by encoding the prior into a graph-cut segmentation framework, where the training data is automatically generated from a predicted road region of the current image. By iteratively performing the graph-cut segmentation, an accurate road region will be obtained. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on the challenging SUN Database validate the robustness and efficiency of our method. We believe that the road shape prior can also be used to yield improvements for many other road detection algorithms.