Investigating Outdoor Recognition Performance of Infrared Beacons for Infrastructure-based Localization

TL;DR

This paper presents an infrared beacon and camera system capable of reliable outdoor detection at 100 meters, aiming to improve infrastructure-based localization for automated vehicles under various lighting conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel infrared beacon and camera system with a detailed image processing pipeline, demonstrating reliable outdoor recognition in daytime and nighttime conditions.

Findings

Reliable detection of beacons at 100m distance

System works effectively in both daytime and nighttime

Provides a low-cost infrastructure-based localization approach

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a system comprised of infrared beacons and a camera equipped with an optical band-pass filter. Our system can reliably detect and identify individual beacons at 100m distance regardless of lighting conditions. We describe the camera and beacon design as well as the image processing pipeline in detail. In our experiments, we investigate and demonstrate the ability of the system to recognize our beacons in both daytime and nighttime conditions. High precision localization is a key enabler for automated vehicles but remains unsolved, despite strong recent improvements. Our low-cost, infrastructure-based approach is a potential step towards solving the localization problem. All datasets are made available here https://embedded.rwth-aachen.de/doku.php?id=forschung:mobility:infralocalization:concept.