An Estimation Method of Road Narrowing Condition in In-vehicle Camera

Abstract

This paper proposes an estimation method of road narrowing condition by piled snow in in-vehicle camera image. The winter roads are possibly narrowed with the piled snow and caused traffic congestion. To maintain the urban functions the data accumulation of piled snow is very useful for snow removal planning. Therefore, in this paper, a novel method for estimating the road narrowing condition from in in-vehicle camera image is proposed. The proposed method is composed by hierarchical two steps which identify roads which have enough road capacity with piled snow and narrow roads which cause traffic congestion. These steps are used the low level image features and the position of road structures. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct two experiments. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.