General Obstacle Detection by Ground Shape Invariant Features with a Fisheye Camera

Reliable detection of obstacles around the vehicle is crucial for autonomous cars. We present a novel and robust ground shape invariant feature method for general obstacle detection with a car-mounted monocular fisheye camera. Both stationary and moving obstacles can be detected by our approach without recovering the camera motion. Firstly, In order to compute the ground shape invariant feature, the image is mapped into the top view image. And then feature points are extracted and matched between adjacent frames. Secondly, the points are grouped according to image patch partition. Finally, the ground shape invariant feature is computed for each group of points to detect obstacle points. Extensive experiments have been carried out with prerecorded video sequences including various obstacle types, various scenes and various illumination conditions. The experimental results show promising detection performance of the proposed method.