Panorama-Based Multilane Recognition for Advanced Navigation Map Generation

Precise navigation map is crucial in many fields. This paper proposes a panorama based method to detect and recognize lane markings and traffic signs on the road surface. Firstly, to deal with the limited field of view and the occlusion problem, this paper designs a vision-based sensing system which consists of a surround view system and a panoramic system. Secondly, in order to detect and identify traffic signs on the road surface, sliding window based detection method is proposed. Template matching method and SVM (Support Vector Machine) are used to recognize the traffic signs. Thirdly, to avoid the occlusion problem, this paper utilities vision based ego-motion estimation to detect and remove other vehicles. As surround view images contain less dynamic information and gray scales, improved ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm is introduced to ensure that the ego-motion parameters are consequently obtained. For panoramic images, optical flow algorithm is used. The results from the surround view system help to filter the optical flow and optimize the ego-motion parameters; other vehicles are detected by the optical flow feature. Experimental results show that it can handle different kinds of lane markings and traffic signs well.