Road region estimation using a sequence of monocular images

In advanced driving assistance systems, it is important to be able to detect the region covered by the road in the images. This paper proposes a method for estimating the road region in images captured by a vehicle-mounted monocular camera. Our proposed method first estimates all of relevant parameters for the camera motion and the 3D road plane from correspondence points between successive images. By calculating a homography matrix from the estimated camera motion and the estimated road plane parameters, and then warping the image at the previous frame, the road region can be determined. To achieve robustness in various road scenes, our method selects the threshold for determining the road region adaptively and incorporates the assumption of a simple road region boundary. In our experiments, it has been shown that the proposed method is able to estimate the road region in real road environments.