Robust inverse perspective mapping based on vanishing point

Vision-based road signs detection and recognition has been widely used in intelligent robotics and automotive autonomous driving technology. Currently, one-time calibration of inverse perspective mapping (IPM) parameters is employed to eliminate the effect of perspective mapping, but it is not robust to the uphill and downhill road. We propose an automatic inverse perspective mapping method based on vanishing point, which is adaptive to the uphill and downhill road even with slight rotation of the main road direction. The proposed algorithm is composed of the following three steps: detecting the vanishing point, calculating the pitch and yaw angles and adopting inverse perspective mapping to obtain the “bird´s eye view” image. Experimental results show that the adaptability of our inverse perspective mapping framework is comparable to existing state-of-the-art methods, which is conducive to the subsequent detection and recognition of road signs.