Accurate road following and reconstruction by computer vision

This paper presents a method designed to track and to recover the three-dimensional (3-D) shape of a road by computer vision. The method is based first upon an accurate detection algorithm which provides a reliable estimation of the roadside in the image. This algorithm works by recursive updating of a statistical model of the lane obtained by an off-line training phase. Once the sides have been located, a reconstruction algorithm computes the vehicle location on its lane, the 3-D shape of the road, and gives both the sides location and their confidence interval for the next image. The detection algorithm then looks for the roadside in this interval in order to limit the computational times, which are about 30-150 ms on a HP workstation.