Extraction of features from airborne Lidar and onboard image data for future driver assistance systems

Driver assistance system is currently an active research and development field for the general goal to provide useful information to drivers in order to reduce the number of injuries and fatalities in traffic. One important component of future systems will be an accurate and reliable positioning, which can be realized by relative measurement, using onboard sensors and maps of the environment. However, a prerequisite will be that such maps can be produced fully automatically. This paper explores the use of dense laser scan data from airborne LiDAR scanning systems for the production of such 3D navigation maps, extracting features from airborne LiDAR data and onboard image data, so as to simultaneous matching and positioning based on overlapping the LiDAR data and onboard images.