Vanishing Point Estimation for On-Road Navigation

Autonomous navigation of robot for on-road driving has gained growing importance in automobile research area. Image based path tracking is being considered for future driving assistance. Image from a monocular camera directing in front side is used for tracking the drivable road area and road direction. Vanishing Point estimation has been considered very important in case of driver assistance systems to indicate the possible turning direction of road ahead. This paper describes different methods used for vanishing point estimation in a captured image frame. As the road driving is real time operation, timing considerations play a vital role along with the accuracy. With this constraint in mind, an algorithm has been proposed for texture based vanishing point detection. Keywords— Autonomous Vehicles, Path Tracking, Robot Navigation, Vanishing Point Tracking, Drive Assistance