The Stixel World - A Compact Medium Level Representation of the 3D-World

Ambitious driver assistance for complex urban scenarios demands a complete awareness of the situation, including all moving and stationary objects that limit the free space. Recent progress in real-time dense stereo vision provides precise depth information for nearly every pixel of an image. This rises new questions: How can one efficiently analyze half a million disparity values of next generation imagers? And how can one find all relevant obstacles in this huge amount of data in real-time? In this paper we build a medium-level representation named "stixel-world". It takes into account that the free space in front of vehicles is limited by objects with almost vertical surfaces. These surfaces are approximated by adjacent rectangular sticks of a certain width and height. The stixel-world turns out to be a compact but flexible representation of the three-dimensional traffic situation that can be used as the common basis for the scene understanding tasks of driver assistance and autonomous systems.

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