Fusion of Laserscanner and Videofor Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

In established driver assistance systems each application relies on its own sensor, which observes the vehicles environment. Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have increasing demand for several sensor systems. The described Laserscanner and video based sensor fusion approach serves as a general platform for multiple active safety and comfort applications. A large field of view is obtained and the certainty and precision of the estimates in the relevant regions is increased significantly. Vehicle position measurements and classification, lane estimation as well as pedestrian recognition enable a broad support for applications such as Lane Departure Warning, Automatic Emergency Breaking, PreCrash, Pedestrian Protection, ACC Stop&Go and Low Speed Following. INTRODUCTION Recent projects on driver assistance systems have focused on applications such as PreCrash (Chameleon) [1], ACC Stop&Go (Carsense) [2] and recognition of vulnerable road users (PROTECTOR). These advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) have increasing demand for several sensor systems, which are mainly complementary but also redundant. Some research has therefore been focused on multi-sensor fusion [2,3,4,5,6]. The aim of such a step is to provide a fused description of the traffic scene surrounding the vehicle, which is relevant for ADAS, but not specific to a certain application. This fusion system incorporates the data of diverse sensors into a single description. Thus the field of view of a single sensor is enlarged, the certainty and precision of the estimates is increased and additionally this system design is economically efficient, as different applications share a set of sensors.