Optical Flow based Visual Potential Field for Autonomous Driving
This addresses the problem of collision-free navigation for autonomous vehicles using only monocular cameras, but it is incremental as it builds on existing optical flow and potential field methods.
The paper tackles monocular vision-based navigation for autonomous driving by generating a visual potential field from sparse optical flow to guide vehicles without prior map or obstacle information, achieving successful navigation in synthetic and real image tests.
Monocular vision-based navigation for automated driving is a challenging task due to the lack of enough information to compute temporal relationships among objects on the road. Optical flow is an option to obtain temporal information from monocular camera images and has been used widely with the purpose of identifying objects and their relative motion. This work proposes to generate an artificial potential field, i.e. visual potential field, from a sequence of images using sparse optical flow, which is used together with a gradient tracking sliding mode controller to navigate the vehicle to destination without collision with obstacles. The angular reference for the vehicle is computed online. This work considers that the vehicle does not require to have a priori information from the map or obstacles to navigate successfully. The proposed technique is tested both in synthetic and real images.