Combining Laser Range, Color, and Texture Cues for Autonomous Road Following

We describe results on combining depth information from a laser range-finder and color and texture image cues to segment ill-structured dirt, gravel, and asphalt roads as input to an autonomous road following system. A large number of registered laser and camera images were captured at frame-rate on a variety of rural roads, allowing laser features such as 3-D height and smoothness to be correlated with image features such as color histograms and Gabor filter responses. A small set of road models was generated by training separate neural networks on labeled feature vectors clustered by road “type.” By first classifying the type of a novel road image, an appropriate second-stage classifier was selected to segment individual pixels, achieving a high degree of accuracy on arbitrary images from the dataset. Segmented images combined with laser range information and the vehicle’s inertial navigation data were used to construct 3-D maps suitable for path planning.