Robust Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Driver Assistance Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust obstacle detection and recognition method for driver assistance systems. Unlike existing methods, our method aims to detect and recognize obstacles on the road rather than all the obstacles in the view. The proposed method involves two stages aiming at an increased quality of the results. The first stage is to locate the positions of obstacles on the road. In order to accurately locate the on-road obstacles, we propose an obstacle detection method based on the U-V disparity map generated from a stereo vision system. The proposed U-V disparity algorithm makes use of the V-disparity map that provides a good representation of the geometric content of the road region to extract the road features, and then detects the on-road obstacles using our proposed realistic U-disparity map that eliminates the foreshortening effects caused by the perspective projection of pinhole imaging. The proposed realistic U-disparity map greatly improves the detection accuracy of the distant obstacles compared with the conventional U-disparity map. Second, the detection results of our proposed U-V disparity algorithm are put into a context-aware Faster-RCNN that combines the interior and contextual features to improve the recognition accuracy of small and occluded obstacles. Specifically, we propose a context-aware module and apply it into the architecture of Faster-RCNN. The experimental results on two public datasets show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance under various driving conditions.