Simultaneous estimation of pitch angle and lane width from the video image of a marked road

Abstract

The vision system for autonomous road vehicle guidance, which has been developed during the last years at the UniBwM, is currently being ported from 5 ton vans to a family sedan (Mercedes 500 SEL). The cruising speed of 120 km/h, which the system is designed for, requires a further maximal look-ahead distance for road and obstacle recognition. For achieving high robustness, it is necessary to estimate the camera pitch angle as an additional state parameter. In this paper an approach for simultaneous estimation of pitch angle and lane width from the road image is presented, both based on Kalman filtering. The pitch angle is modelled by a damped harmonical oscillator with a given frequency /spl omega//sub 0/, a time constant r, and a pitch offset. For a change in the lane width, a linear dynamical model is assumed. The estimators are validated by numerical simulations. Evaluation of video scenes, shot from the sedan vehicle, show good results for pitch and lane width estimation.