Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Navigation Through Computer Vision

Abstract

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) equipped with camera systems have emerged as a pivotal solution for smart urban mobility. The escalating demand for AVs emphasizes the need to prioritize driving safety, especially in challenging weather conditions like heavy rain. In this context, the accurate perception of environmental features, notably lane markers, becomes imperative for effective autonomous navigation. Severe weather can lead to camera image degradation, including blur and loss of details, impacting the accuracy of subsequent image processing. Despite the prevalence of camera-based methods, sensitivity to environmental noise, such as rain streaks, poses a challenge, necessitating preprocessing mechanisms like rain removal to enhance lane detection accuracy. This chapter focuses on the development of a vision-based algorithm dedicated to detecting and tracking lane markers, coupled with an efficient rain streak removal algorithm. A progressive approach to lane detection on city roads is presented, incorporating sliding windows and Kalman filter methodologies into a model-based method. Integration of the Kalman filter has yielded a notable improvement in video processing speeds, from 1.67 to 2.72 frames/s, enhancing overall operational efficiency. Furthermore, a novel neural network structure, amalgamating convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM), is introduced for rain streak removal before performing lane marker detection. Comparative analysis against existing methods demonstrates an average 2.3% improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for rain removal and an 8% enhancement in Google Vision test results.