The detection of the road is a key element of driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.
Indeed, objects, obstacles, other road users, must be detected but also positioned relatively to the road.
The detection of the entire route, that is to say not only its markings or edges, but all the way, should enable
embedded intelligence to select appropriate action.
The company NEXYAD ihas been working on this issue for over 20 years without interruption, and has accumulated a large number of cases of road types, of coatings, in various atmospheric conditions.
This is to detect the rollable area on the road, without regard to, in a first step, lane markings.
Indeed, in Europe, there are many unmarked roads, and work on a marked road may change the markings and
make a « follow the markings strategy » dangerous.
In the images below you can see on the left a typical French countryside road with no markings, and on the right image, new markings was achieved while former markings still strongly visible.
These cases are quite common on our European roads and a driver assistance system, or a driving delegation
system, must at least understand such cases and if necessary tell the driver to cope with it by himself.
The NEXYAD road detection module, RoadNex V2.1 is a brick to go further to cope with these cases :
RoadNex V2.1 should be coupled with road signs detection, road markings detection, obstacle detection, in order to build an intelligent perception system. RoadNex is then a key module of such a system.
The road detection module NEXYAD, RoadNex V2.1 is available as a component into the asynchronous real time framework RT-MAPS : See HERE