Rapid vanishing point estimation for general road detection

Abstract

This paper deals with fast vanishing point estimation for autonomous robot navigation. Preceding approaches showed suitable results and vanishing point estimation was used in many robotics tasks, especially in the detection of illstructured roads. The main drawback of such approaches is the computational complexity - the possibilities of hardware accelerations are mentioned in many papers, however, we believe, that the biggest benefit of a vanishing point estimation algorithm is for primarily tele-operated robots in the case of signal loss, etc., that cannot use specialized hardware just for this feature. In this paper, we investigate possibilities of an efficient implementation by the expansion of Gabor wavelets into a linear combination of Haar-like box functions to perform fast filtering via integral image trick and discuss the utilization of superpixels in the voting scheme to provide a significant speed-up (more than 40 times), while we loose only 3-5% in precision.