Detection of parked vehicles from a radar based occupancy grid

For autonomous parking applications to become possible, knowledge about the parking environment is required. Therefore, a real-time algorithm for detecting parked vehicles from radar data is presented. These data are first accumulated in an occupancy grid from which objects are detected by applying techniques borrowed from the computer vision field. Two random forest classifiers are trained to recognize two categories of objects: parallel-parked vehicles and cross-parked vehicles. Performances of the classifiers are evaluated as well as the capacity of the complete system to detect parked vehicles in real world scenarios.