Visual navigation of roadways

Abstract

This paper describes ongoing work at the Computer Vision Laboratory, in support of the Autonomous Land Vehicle project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Strategic Computing Program. A visual navigation system is being developed to enable a vehicle to follow roads which, for the time being, are free of obstacles. We have developed an approach which consists of a boot-strap phase and a feed-forward phase. In each phase, visual processing is executed in three modules: an image processing module, a geometry module and a rule-based reasoning module. These modules and their interrelationships are described, with particular detail given to the image processing module.