English

Abstract

In this paper, we proposes the novel method which measures the distance to the side wall by a single camera. Our method creates the inverse perspective mapping (IPM) image by projecting an input image to the virtual plane which is parallel to the moving direction of the vehicle and which is perpendicular to the road surface. Then, the distance to the side wall is calculated from the histogram whose bin is the length of an optical flow detected in the IPM image. The optical flow of the IPM image is detected by a block matching and the motion of the side wall is obtained from the peak of the histogram. Our method is robust to changes in the appearance of the texture on the side wall that occur when a vehicle moves along a road. Experimental results using simulation images and real road images show the effectiveness of the proposed method.