Recognition of Road Contours Using Delineators at Night

Drivers of vehicles focus their gaze in the direction of movement, driver guesses an optimum route using the white road line and the delineators. However, the range that can be clearly seen in the headlights is limited, it is difficult to guess the optimum route. This paper proposes a method that estimate road contour using delineators. The road contours are estimated from the 3D positions of delineators located on the sides of roads, which are extracted using a circle detection filter. Then, clothoid curve is applied to the delineators and the parameters of clothoid curve are obtained. This classifies the parameter into four kinds of curves using support vector machine. In simulation experiment, we create a virtual road. A classification rate was 86.9 %. Our method was able to classify the road contour by high accuracy.