Visual navigation of roadways

This paper describes ongoing work at the Computer Vision Laboratory, in support of the Autonomous Land Vehicle project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency´s Strategic Computing Program. A visual navigation system is being developed to enable a vehicle to follow roads which, for the time being, are free of obstacles. We have developed an approach which consists of a boot-strap phase and a feed-forward phase. In each phase, visual processing is executed in three modules: an image processing module, a geometry module and a rule-based reasoning module. These modules and their interrelationships are described, with particular detail given to the image processing module.