Road extraction algorithm based on intrinsic image and vanishing point for unstructured road image

Abstract Road region extraction is one of the key technologies to support the safe operation of vehicle intelligent system. Aiming at the current demands and difficulties of extracting unstructured roads in the field, a new road extraction algorithm based on vanishing point location is proposed in this paper. Based on the improvement of the vanishing point detection method with road border region estimation, the proposed method comprehends the spatial structure of the road image, and combines the color and edge information of the intrinsic image which extracted based on regression analysis. Then the road region can be extracted. The proposed method makes full use of the intermediate information in calculation process to improve the computational efficiency while ensuring the accuracy of the result. Besides, the algorithm performs well for road images under different environments.