Fast and Robust Vanishing Point Detection for Unstructured Road Following

Vision-based unstructured road following is a challenging task due to the nature of the scene. This paper describes a novel algorithm to improve the accuracy and robustness of vanishing point estimation with very low computational cost. The novelties of this paper are three aspects: 1) We use joint activities of four Gabor filters and confidence measure for speeding up the process of texture orientation estimation. 2) Misidentification chances and computational complexity of the algorithm are reduced by using a particle filter. It limits vanishing point search range and reduces the number of pixels to be voted. The algorithm combines the peakedness measure of vote accumulator space with the displacements of moving average of observations to regulate the distribution of vanishing point candidates. 3) Attributed to the design of a noise-insensitive observation model, the proposed system still has high detection accuracy even when less than 60 sparsely distributed vanishing point candidates are used for voting as the influence introduced by the stochastic measurement noise of vote function and the sparsity of the vanishing point candidates is reduced. The method has been implemented and tested over 20 000 video frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves better performance than some state-of-the-art texture-based vanishing point detection methods in terms of detection accuracy and speed.