Evaluation of image processing algorithms on vehicle safety system based on free-viewpoint image rendering

Development of algorithms for vehicle safety systems, which support safety driving, takes a long period of time and a huge cost because it requires an evaluation stage where huge combinations of possible driving situations should be evaluated by using videos which are captured beforehand in real environments. In this paper, we address this problem by using free viewpoint images instead of the real images. More concretely, we generate free-viewpoint images from a combination of a 3D point cloud measured by laser scanners and an omni-directional image sequence acquired in a real environment. We basically rely on the 3D point cloud for geometrically correct virtual viewpoint images. In order to remove the holes caused by the unmeasured region of the 3D point cloud and to remove false silhouettes in surface reconstruction, we have developed a technique of free-viewpoint image generation that uses both a 3D point cloud and depth information extracted from images. In the experiments, we have evaluated our framework with a white line detection algorithm and experimental results have shown the applicability of free-viewpoint images for evaluation of algorithms.