ShadowCam: Real-Time Detection Of Moving Obstacles Behind A Corner For Autonomous Vehicles

Moving obstacles occluded by corners are a potential source for collisions in mobile robotics applications such as autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we address the problem of anticipating such collisions by proposing a vision-based detection algorithm for obstacles which are outside of a vehicle’s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Naser, Felix M, Gilitschenski, Igor, Rosman, Guy, Amini, Alexander A, Durand, Frederic, Torralba, Antonio, Wornell, Gregory W., Freeman, William T, Karaman, Sertac, Rus, Daniela L
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: IEEE 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119439
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2752-2311
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9673-1267
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9919-069X
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4915-0256
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9166-4758
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2231-7995
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5473-3566
Description
Summary:Moving obstacles occluded by corners are a potential source for collisions in mobile robotics applications such as autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we address the problem of anticipating such collisions by proposing a vision-based detection algorithm for obstacles which are outside of a vehicle’s direct line of sight. Our method detects shadows of obstacles hidden around corners and automatically classifies these unseen obstacles as “dynamic” or “static”. We evaluate our proposed detection algorithm on real-world corners and a large variety of simulated environments to assess generalizability in different challenging surface and lighting conditions. The mean classification accuracy on simulated data is around 80% and on realworld corners approximately 70%. Additionally, we integrate our detection system on a full-scale autonomous wheelchair and demonstrate its feasibility as an additional safety mechanism through real-world experiments. We release our real-timecapable implementation of the proposed ShadowCam algorithm and the dataset containing simulated and real-world data under an open-source license