Robust and efficient vanishing point detection in unstructured road scenes for assistive navigation

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to propose a robust and efficient method for vanishing point detection in unstructured road scenes.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed method includes two main stages: drivable region estimation and vanishing point detection. In drivable region estimation stage, the road image is segmented into a set of patches; then the drivable region is estimated by the patch-wise manifold ranking. In vanishing point detection stage, the LSD method is used to extract the straight lines; then a series of principles are proposed to remove the noise lines. Finally, the vanishing point is detected by a novel voting strategy.

Findings

The proposed method is validated on various unstructured road images collected from the real world. It is more robust and more efficient than the state-of-the-art method and the other three recent methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the detected vanishing point is practical for vision-sensor-based navigation in complex unstructured road scenes.

Originality/value

This paper proposes a patch-wise manifold ranking method to estimate the drivable region that contains most of the informative clues for vanishing point detection. Based on the removal of the noise lines through a series of principles, a novel voting strategy is proposed to detect the vanishing point.

Citation

Han, J., Yang, Z., Hu, G., Fang, T. and Xu, H. (2019), "Robust and efficient vanishing point detection in unstructured road scenes for assistive navigation", Sensor Review, Vol. 39 No. 1, pp. 137-146. https://doi.org/10.1108/SR-02-2018-0024