Road Curb Detection and Localization with Monocular Forward-view Vehicle Camera

We propose a robust method for estimating road curb 3D parameters (size, location, orientation) using a calibrated monocular camera equipped with a fisheye lens. Automatic curb detection and localization is particularly important in the context of Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), i.e. to prevent possible collision and damage of the vehicle's bumper during perpendicular and diagonal parking maneuvers. Combining 3D geometric reasoning with advanced vision-based detection methods, our approach is able to estimate the vehicle to curb distance in real time with mean accuracy of more than 90%, as well as its orientation, height and depth. Our approach consists of two distinct components - curb detection in each individual video frame and temporal analysis. The first part comprises of sophisticated curb edges extraction and parametrized 3D curb template fitting. Using a few assumptions regarding the real world geometry, we can thus retrieve the curb's height and its relative position w.r.t. the moving vehicle on which the camera is mounted. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier fed with Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) is used for appearance-based filtering out outliers. In the second part, the detected curb regions are tracked in the temporal domain, so as to perform a second pass of false positives rejection. We have validated our approach on a newly collected database of 11 videos under different conditions. We have used point-wise LIDAR measurements and manual exhaustive labels as a ground truth.