Luca Bombini

Obstacle detection and classification fusing radar and vision

This paper presents a system whose aim is to detect and classify road obstacles, like pedestrians and vehicles, by fusing data coming from different sensors: a camera, a radar, and an inertial sensor. The camera is mainly used to refine the vehiclespsila boundaries detected by the radar and to discard those who might be false positives; at the same time, a symmetry based pedestrian detection algorithm is executed, and its results are merged with a set of regions of interest, provided by a Motion Stereo technique.

VIAC: An out of ordinary experiment

This paper presents the preliminary results of VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a test of autonomous driving along an unknown route from Italy to China. It took 3 months to run the entire test; all data have been logged, including all data generated by the sensors, vehicle data, and GPS info. This huge amount of information has been packed during the trip, compressed, and transferred back to Parma for further processing. This data is now ready for a deep analysis of the various systems performance, with the aim of virtually running the whole trip multiple times with improved versions of the software. This paper discusses some preliminary figures obtained by the analysis of the data collected during the test. More information will be generated by a deeper analysis, which will take additional time, being the data about 40 terabyte in size.

GOLD: A Framework for Developing Intelligent-Vehicle Vision Applications

To develop real-time vision applications for use in highly dynamic environments, such as automotive traffic, researchers must gather large amounts of data from different sensors and systems at different rates. Software capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and - ultimately - data processing and visualization is fundamentally important to improving researcher efficiency. The general obstacle and lane detection framework supports different devices and makes it easy to add new system functionalities. GOLD can easily become the engine for many automotive applications, and it could work in other application domains as well.

Sensing requirements for a 13,000 km intercontinental autonomous drive

This paper presents the design issues that were considered for the equipment of 4 identical autonomous vehicles that will drive themselves without human intervention on an intercontinental route for more than 13,000 km.

An evaluation of monocular image stabilization algorithms for automotive applications

The performance of many computer vision applications, especially in the automotive field, can be greatly increased if camera oscillations induced by movements of the acquisition devices are corrected by a stabilization system. An effective stabilizer should cope with different oscillation frequencies and amplitude intervals, and work in a wide range of environments (such as urban, extra-urban or even unstructured ones). In this paper we analyze three different approaches, based on signature, feature, and correlation tracking respectively, that have been devised to face these problems

Test-bed for Unified Perception & Decision Architecture

This paper presents the test-bed that will be developed for a Unified Perception & Decision Architecture (UPDA). Due to the increasing demand of ADAS systems to be mounted on cars, it is more and more important to develop a unified architecture that can communicate and share information between these systems. This is the aim of an ERC-founded project and to develop and test such architecture a car has been set up with many different sensors.

An embedded system for counting passengers in public transportation vehicles

This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles. The underlying idea is to monitor the number of passengers getting in or out public transportation means like buses and metros over time hence computing reliable estimations in order to improve vehicles door control. A stereo vision system is presented, it has been developed considering its future installation over bus doors; a feature based people counting algorithm and an object tracking system are used to count people getting in or out of a specific region of interest. The system here described will be installed and tested on an Ivecobus Citelis vehicle in the framework of the Italian Industria 2015 Ecoautobus initiative.

Vision technologies for intelligent vehicles

This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision applications for Intelligent Vehicles derived from the 15 year experience of VisLab. Some illustrative examples are also discussed.

Advanced safety sensor for gate automation

This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. These systems include automatic swing and sliding gates, bollards and barriers to prevent unwanted access. In current installations the anti-crushing protection is ensured by an electronic device installed on the control boards, which directly controls drive torque, and a couple of infrared photodetectors: when an obstacle is touched by the gate leafs or barriers, or cuts the infrared beam, the control board stops the gate movement. Conversely, the new method proposed in this paper avoids collisions with obstacles and increases the overall detection performance. The new device returns a stop signal when an obstacle is present in a predefined area. The algorithm has been integrated in a real access system to test its performance.

Camera-Based Automotive Systems

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.