• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.979-989
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• 2016

Traversable region detection is an essential step for advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving car systems, and it has been conducted by detecting lanes from input images. The performance can be unreliable, however, when the light condition is poor or there exist no lanes on the roads. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an algorithm which utilizes the information about the number of lanes and texture analysis. The proposed algorithm first specifies road region candidates by utilizing the number of lanes information. Among road region candidates, the road region is determined as the region in which texture is homogeneous and texture discontinuities occur around its boundaries. Traversable region is finally detected by dividing the estimated road region with the number of lanes information. This paper combines the proposed algorithm with a lane detection-based method to construct a system, and simulation results show that the system detects traversable region even on the road with poor light conditions or no lanes.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1047-1053
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• 2017

The range data acquired by 2D/3D LIDAR, a core sensor for autonomous navigation of an unmanned ground vehicle, is effectively used for ground modeling and obstacle detection. Within the ambiguous boundary of a road environment, however, LIDAR does not provide enough information to analyze the traversable region. This paper presents a new method to analyze a candidate area using the characteristics of LIDAR reflectivity for better detection of a traversable region. We detected a candidate traversable area through the front zone of the vehicle using the learning process of LIDAR reflectivity, after calibration of the reflectivity of each channel. We validated the proposed method of a candidate traversable region detection by performing experiments in the real operating environment of the unmanned ground vehicle.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.773-780
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• 2015

Navigation in outdoor environments is a fundamental and challenging problem for unmanned ground vehicles. Detecting lane markings or boundaries on the road may be one of the solutions to make navigation easy. However, because of various environments and road conditions, a robust lane detection is difficult. In this paper, we propose a new approach for estimating virtual lanes on a traversable region. Estimating the virtual lanes consist of two steps: (i) we detect virtual road region through road model selection based on traversability at current frame and similarity between the interframe and (ii) we estimate virtual lane using the number of lane on the road and results of previous frame. To improve the detection performance and reduce the searching region of interests, we use a probability map representing the traversability of the outdoor terrain. In addition, by considering both current and previous frame simultaneously, the proposed method estimate more stable virtual lanes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using real data in outdoor environments.