Colour Vision and Hue for Autonomous Vehicle Guidance

We explore the use of colour for interpretation of unstructured off-road scenes. The aim is to extract driveable areas for use in an autonomous off-road vehicle in real-time. The terrain is an unstructured tropical jungle area with vegetation, water and red mud roads. We show that hue is both robust to changing lighting conditions and an important feature for correctly interpreting this type of scene. We believe that our method also can be deployed in other types of terrain, with minor changes, as long as the terrain is coloured and well saturated. Only 2D information is processed at the moment, but we aim at extending the method to also treat 3D information, by the use of stereo vision or motion.