Occluded side road detection using a single camera

This paper presents the method to detect the entrance to a side road from a monocular image. At first, the candidate of the entrance to a side road is estimated in the normal inverse perspective mapping (IPM) image created by mapping an input image to a road plane. In the IPM image, the entrance candidate is searched along the road boundary extracted by the rectangular separability filter. Next, the input image is projected to the virtual side plane which is parallel to the vehicle´s moving direction and vertical to the road surface. We call this mapping IPM-VSP. The distance to the candidate region is measured in the IPM-VSP image. The depth is discontinuous between a side road and the roadside object of this side. Therefore, when the gap of distance is detected around the candidate region, this candidate is selected as the entrance to a side road.