Curb Detection Method Research Articles

Curb Detection Using a Novel Deep Learning Framework Based on YOLO‐v2

AbstractCurb detection with a monocular camera is important to assist driving by detecting curbs to avoid accidents. However, various road scenes and curb shapes make it difficult to detect curbs based on a single image. In this study, a novel image‐based curb detection method that is highly efficient, inexpensive, and less complex than LiDAR‐based solutions was developed. A deep learning framework was used to detect curbs from road images automatically. A custom convolutional neural network (CNN) model was built, and another seven pretrained models were fine‐tuned for curb patch classification. The evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, F1‐score, area under curve, and prediction time, were considered comprehensively to select the optimal CNN architecture. Three promising CNN architectures were employed as classification networks and embedded into the YOLO‐v2 framework to construct curb detectors. The detection performance was evaluated in terms of the average precision on an urban road image dataset. By configuring parameters for the optimal CNN architecture, the best detector achieved an average precision of 99.16%, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2022 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Real-Time Road Curb and Lane Detection for Autonomous Driving Using LiDAR Point Clouds

The commercialization of automated driving vehicles promotes the development of safer and more efficient autonomous driving technologies including lane marking detection strategy, which is considered to be the most promising feature in environmental perception technology. To reduce the tradeoff between time consumption and detection precision, we propose a real-time lane marking detection method by using LiDAR point clouds directly. A constrained RANSAC algorithm is applied to select the regions of interest and filter the background data. Further, a road curb detection method based on the segment point density is also proposed to classify the road points and curb points. Finally, an adaptive threshold selection method is proposed to identify lane markings. In this investigation, five datasets are collected from different driving conditions that include the straight road, curved road, and uphill, to test the proposed method. The proposed method is evaluated under different performance metrics such as Precision, Recall, Dice, Jaccard as well as the average detection distance and computation time for the five datasets. The quantitative results show the efficiency and feasibility of this proposed method.

Road-Segmentation-Based Curb Detection Method for Self-Driving via a 3D-LiDAR Sensor

The effective detection of curbs is fundamental and crucial for the navigation of a self-driving car. This paper presents a real-time curb detection method that automatically segments the road and detects its curbs using a 3D-LiDAR sensor. The point cloud data of the sensor are first processed to distinguish on-road and off-road areas. A sliding-beam method is then proposed to segment the road by using the off-road data. A curb-detection method is finally applied to obtain the position of curbs for each road segments. The proposed method is tested on the data sets acquired from the self-driving car of laboratory of VeCaN at Tongji University. Off-line experiments demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method, i.e., the average recall, precision and their harmonic mean are all over 80%. Online experiments demonstrate the real-time capability for autonomous driving as the average processing time for each frame is only around 12 ms.

A Practical Point Cloud Based Road Curb Detection Method for Autonomous Vehicle

Robust and quick road curb detection under various situations is critical in developing intelligent vehicles. However, the road curb detection is easily affected by the obstacles in the road area when Lidar based method is applied. A practical road curb detection method using point cloud from a three-dimensional Lidar for autonomous vehicle is reported in this paper. First, a multi-feature, loose-threshold, varied-scope ground segmentation method is presented to increase the robustness of ground segmentation with which obstacles above the ground can be detected. Second, the road curb is detected by applying the global road trend and an extraction-update mechanism. Experiments show the robustness and efficiency of the road curb detection under various environments. The road curb detection method is 10 times the speed of traditional method and the accuracy is much higher than existing methods.

Robust curb detection with fusion of 3D-Lidar and camera data.

Curb detection is an essential component of Autonomous Land Vehicles (ALV), especially important for safe driving in urban environments. In this paper, we propose a fusion-based curb detection method through exploiting 3D-Lidar and camera data. More specifically, we first fuse the sparse 3D-Lidar points and high-resolution camera images together to recover a dense depth image of the captured scene. Based on the recovered dense depth image, we propose a filter-based method to estimate the normal direction within the image. Then, by using the multi-scale normal patterns based on the curb's geometric property, curb point features fitting the patterns are detected in the normal image row by row. After that, we construct a Markov Chain to model the consistency of curb points which utilizes the continuous property of the curb, and thus the optimal curb path which links the curb points together can be efficiently estimated by dynamic programming. Finally, we perform post-processing operations to filter the outliers, parameterize the curbs and give the confidence scores on the detected curbs. Extensive evaluations clearly show that our proposed method can detect curbs with strong robustness at real-time speed for both static and dynamic scenes.

A New Curb Detection Method for Unmanned Ground Vehicles Using 2D Sequential Laser Data

Curb detection is an important research topic in environment perception, which is an essential part of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operations. In this paper, a new curb detection method using a 2D laser range finder in a semi-structured environment is presented. In the proposed method, firstly, a local Digital Elevation Map (DEM) is built using 2D sequential laser rangefinder data and vehicle state data in a dynamic environment and a probabilistic moving object deletion approach is proposed to cope with the effect of moving objects. Secondly, the curb candidate points are extracted based on the moving direction of the vehicle in the local DEM. Finally, the straight and curved curbs are detected by the Hough transform and the multi-model RANSAC algorithm, respectively. The proposed method can detect the curbs robustly in both static and typical dynamic environments. The proposed method has been verified in real vehicle experiments.