Sparse Coding of Weather and Illuminations for ADAS and Autonomous Driving

Weather and illumination are critical factors in vision tasks such as road detection, vehicle recognition, and active lighting for autonomous vehicles and ADAS. Understanding the weather and illumination type in a vehicle driving view can guide visual sensing, control vehicle headlight and speed, etc. This paper uses sparse coding technique to identify weather types in driving video, given a set of bases from video samples covering a full spectrum of weather and illumination conditions. We sample traffic and architecture insensitive regions in each video frame for features and obtain clusters of weather and illuminations via unsupervised learning. Then, a set of keys are selected carefully according to the visual appearance of road and sky. For video input, sparse coding of each frame is calculated for representing the vehicle view robustly under a specific illumination. The linear combination of the basis from keys results in weather types for road recognition, active lighting, intelligent vehicle control, etc.