Extraction of Roads From Out Door Images

Abstract

Even when there has been an extensive development of works on road detection and road following during the last two decades, most of them are focused on well structured roads, making difficult its use for humanitarian demining activities. The present work shows a way to use the natural information in outdoor environment to extract the roads or paths characteristics, which can be used as landmarks for the navigation process. Other important observation is that the information combines of two colors, (i.e. the projection R B, Cb or Cr channels) hence reducing the harmful effect of the changing illumination in natural environment. Good results were also achieved in the path planning process. The robot executes a 2? D trajectory planning, which facilitates the work of the vision system because only the close range segmentation has to be correct to be successful in the path planning. With regard to the semantic information, the results show how semantic characteristics make possible the use of low-level operations to extract the information required without spending too many time and hardware resources. Finally, the system implemented is part of a visual exploration strategy which is being implemented in the robot Amaranta, and has other visual perception functions like the detection of buried objects by color and texture analysis. When the whole system will be functional it will integrate techniques of control visual navigation and would be a great tool to test how all the system can work together (Coronado et al., 2005).