Real-time method for general road segmentation

Abstract

Image road detection in unstructured environments is a crucial and challenging problem in the application of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present an effective and computationally efficient solution to segment the road region for structured and unstructured roads. We propose a new method that incorporates two different approaches: road detection based on the vanishing point and image segmentation using a seeded region growing (SRG) algorithm. First, a fast vanishing point detection algorithm is applied and used to find an estimation of the road boundaries. Subsequently, we segment the road area region executing a SRG algorithm based on the vanishing point and the road boundaries found previously. Evaluation of our method over different images datasets demonstrates that it is effective in challenging conditions such as dirt and curved roads.