Robust rear-view ground surface detection with hidden state conditional random field and confidence propagation

We address the problem of detecting rear-view (obstacle free) ground surface using a vehicle production camera. This task is considerably more challenging than general front-view road detection, as the associated challenges widely range from low picture quality, fisheye distortion and large objects, to the absence of useful priors such as vanishing points and road structure. Regarding the challenges, we propose a feature that can simultaneously capture local appearance and context information. In addition, the task suffers from strong appearance variations such as shadows and ground markers. Therefore, we propose a novel conditional random field (CRF) model which includes hidden states indicating confident nodes and propagate their confidence to neighboring nodes. We show that our proposed feature and model can jointly achieve robustness against large objects and shadows/markers, showing excellent detection performance under low quality inputs.