Big-video mining of road appearances in full spectrums of weather and illuminations

Autonomous and safety driving require the control of vehicles within roads. Compared to lane mark tracking, road edge detection is more difficult because of the large variation in road and off-road materials and the influence from weather and illuminations. This work investigates visual appearances of roads under a spectrum of weather conditions. We use big-data mining on large scale naturalistic driving videos taken over a year through four seasons. Large video volumes are condensed to compact road profile images for analysis. Clusters are extracted from all samples with unsupervised learning. Typical views of a spectrum of weather/illuminations are generated from the clusters. Further, by changing the number of clusters we find a stable number for clustering. The learned data are used to classify driving videos into typical illumination types briefly. The surveyed data can also be used in the development of road edge detection algorithm and system as well as their testing.