Obtaining an accurate vehicle position is important for intelligent vehicles in supporting driver safety and comfort. This paper proposes an accurate ego-localization method by matching in-vehicle camera images to an aerial image. There are two major problems in performing an accurate matching: (1) image difference between the aerial image and the in-vehicle camera image due to view-point and illumination conditions, and (2) occlusions in the in-vehicle camera image. To solve the first problem, we use the SURF image descriptor, which achieves robust feature-point matching for the various image differences. Additionally, we extract appropriate feature-points from each road-marking region on the road plane in both images. For the second problem, we utilize sequential multiple in-vehicle camera frames in the matching. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves both ego-localization accuracy and stability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.