A novel shadow-free feature extractor for real-time road detection

Road detection is one of the most important research areas in driver assistance and automated driving field. However, the performance of existing methods is still unsatisfactory, especially in severe shadow conditions. To overcome those difficulties, first we propose a novel shadow-free feature extractor based on the color distribution of road surface pixels. Then we present a road detection framework based on the extractor, whose performance is more accurate and robust than that of existing extractors. Also, the proposed frame-work has much low-complexity, which is suitable for usage in practical systems. © 2016 ACM.