Optical Flow based Visual Potential Field for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel monocular vision navigation method for autonomous vehicles that uses optical flow to generate a visual potential field, enabling collision-free navigation without prior map or obstacle information.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining optical flow-based visual potential fields with a sliding mode controller for obstacle avoidance in autonomous driving.

Findings

Successfully tested in synthetic and real images.

Achieves collision-free navigation without prior map data.

Operates with monocular cameras using optical flow.

Abstract

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.