Use of vanishing points for the early estimation of the curvature of a road through a sequence of images

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are a result of many years of research with the main motivation of reducing the amount and the severity of traffic accidents. The use of cameras is now crucial for many of these systems, such as Lane Departure Warning Systems (LDWS). This paper proposes a method to estimate in advance the change of curvature of a road through vanishing points computed from the orientation of the texture in different regions of the image. This information can be used to aid drivers and control the vehicle speed in curves. The validity of the results is demonstrated experimentally using real public data in adverse lighting conditions.