Obstacle Detection and Safely Navigate the Autonomous Vehicle from Unexpected Obstacles on the Driving Lane

Abstract

Nowadays, autonomous vehicle is an active research area, especially after the emergence of machine vision tasks with deep learning. In such a visual navigation system for autonomous vehicle, the controller captures images and predicts information so that the autonomous vehicle can safely navigate. In this paper, we first introduced small and medium-sized obstacles that were intentionally or unintentionally left on the road, which can pose hazards for both autonomous and human driving situations. Then, we discuss Markov random field (MRF) model by fusing three potentials (gradient potential, curvature prior potential, and depth variance potential) to segment the obstacles and non-obstacles into the hazardous environment. Since the segment of obstacles is done by MRF model, we can predict the information to safely navigate the autonomous vehicle form hazardous environment on the roadway by DNN model. We found that our proposed method can segment the obstacles accuracy from the blended background road and improve the navigation skills of the autonomous vehicle.