Survey of Autonomous Imaging

Images sensed by optical or acoustic imaging systems contain information that can be used for autonomous vehicle navigation and control. The merging of these technologies into one image acquisition module has great potential for vehicle control using image processing techniques. Feature extraction by edge detection and pattern recognition provide a base of high level information to be used by a vehicle controller or path planner. The bag of tricks for an autonomous vehicle imaging system is large because of complexity of the information source and the various needs A complete system will include image enhancement, data reduction, frame to frame correlation and motion detection as well as image understanding. In addition, these functions must operate in real time with available on board processing power.