Accurate Road Geometry Estimation for a Safe Speed Application

In Europe, a considerable part of lives lost in traffic accidents is due to inappropriate vehicle speed or headway. Excessive speed is one of the major causes of accidents on European roads, responsible for one-third of all road accidents. SASPENCE, as part of the EU founded integrated project PReVENT, is developing and evaluating an innovative system able to perform the reliable and comfortable safe speed and safe distance concept, which helps the driver to avoid dangerous situations related to excessive speed or too small headway. In this paper, the high precise reconstruction of the road geometry is discussed. This information about the road geometry is needed in the project to be able to calculate the risk of a given scenario and given speed. A sensor fusion method is proposed to combine information from a vision sensor, a radar system, digital maps, a GPS sensor and odometric sensors to one common description of the road geometry in front of the vehicle. Thereby, the sensor information is used to localize the own vehicle relative to the map data. The system has been tested using real data and the results are shown in the paper