A Reliable Method for Detecting Road Regions from a Single Image Based on Color Distribution and Vanishing Point Location

Numerous advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are gaining popularity even in the mid to low end segment cars. Vision based technologies assisted by the use of cameras cater to a lot of these ADAS systems. These systems enhance the safety of the driver, passenger and pedestrians on the road. In a typical image taken from an on-board camera of a car, it is the road region that occupies most of the pixels. Therefore, an approach for detecting and eliminating road regions from an optical image is proposed which in turn speeds up computations for further object/ROI detection. Our proposed road detection algorithm works in two stages: i) vanishing point detection; and ii) road region identification. Experimental results show that this approach performs better with real-road images of varying texture, colour and shapes.