Automatic illumination invariant road detection with stereo vision

Road detection is an important task in intelligent transportation system (ITS). Variation of illumination is a major issue in most of the vision approaches, which causes the problem of false detection. In this paper, we propose an automatic illumination invariant road detection method with stereo vision. Disparity and illumination invariant road direction are estimated and the road probability map is calculated to decide whether each pixel belongs to road or not. Then, we utilize joint bilateral filter to refine the detected road region. Experimental results on real road scenes show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods.