Laser line recognition for autonomous road roughness measurement

Structure Laser line and vision were wildly applied in the highway roughness measurement in recent years for its advantage of non-contact and efficient. In practice, the curvature of laser line can be utilized to estimate the road roughness quantificationally or qualitatively. A laser line recognition method is proposed for road roughness measurement only depends on gray value. An anisotropic diffusion PM filter is employed to smooth the texture of road surface and hold the laser line and edges clearly. Then, the laser line is well enhanced by a multiscale filter and an edge suppressing operator. The laser line was interpolated more accurately by cubic spline algorithm rather than traditional linear interpolation and level set method, especially in the condition of large curvature. Experiment results of real images of different complex road surface validate the efficiency and robustness of our method.