Machine Vision-Based Method for Estimating Lateral Slope of Structured Roads

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Feb 26;22(5):1867. doi: 10.3390/s22051867.

Abstract

Most of the studies on vehicle control and stability are based on cases of known-road lateral slope, while there are few studies on road lateral-slope estimation. In order to provide reliable information on slope parameters for subsequent studies, this paper provides a method of structured-road lateral-slope estimation based on machine vision. The relationship between the road lateral slope and the tangent slope of the lane line can be found out according to the image-perspective principle; then, the coordinates of the pre-scan point are obtained by the lane line, and the tangent slope of the lane line is used to obtain a more accurate estimation of the road lateral slope. In the implementation process, the lane-line feature information in front of the vehicle is obtained according to machine vision, the lane-line function is fitted according to an SCNN (Spatial CNN) algorithm, then the lateral slope is calculated by using the estimation formula mentioned above. Finally, the road model and vehicle model are established by Prescan software for off-line simulation. The simulation results verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the method.

Keywords: SCNN algorithm; image-perspective principle; machine vision; road lateral-slope estimation.