Color image segmentation in HSI space for automotive applications

This article presents a method for classifying color points for automotive applications in the Hue Saturation Intensity (HSI) Space based on the distances between their projections onto the SI plane. Firstly the HSI Space is analyzed in detail. Secondly the projection of image points from a typical automotive scene onto the SI plane is shown. The minimal classes relevant for driver assistance applications are derived. The requirements for the classification of the points into those classes are obtained. Several weighting functions are proposed and a fast form of an euclidean metric is investigated in detail. In order to improve the sensitivity of the weighting function, dynamic coefficients are introduced. It is shown how to compute them automatically in order to get optimal results for the classification. Finally some results of applying the metric to the sample images are shown and the conclusions are drawn.

Jianwei ZhangEmail:

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Calin Rotaru   is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, Germany. His PhD work focuses on the topic color machine vision for driver assistance systems and is supported by Volkswagen AG, Group Research Electronics. He graduated (2002) with the topic “Stereo Camera Based Object Recognition” for Driver Assistance Systems from the Faculty of Automation and Computer Science of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His research interests include color machine vision, smart vision systems, multisensorial data fusion and vision in driver assistance systems. Thorsten Graf   received the diploma (M.Sc.) degree in computer science and the Ph.D. degree (his thesis was on “Flexible Object Recognition Based on Invariant Theory and Agent Technology”) from the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In 1997 he became a Member of the “Task Oriented Communication” graduate program, University of Bielefeld, funded by the German research foundation DFG. In June 2001 he joined Volkswagen Group Research, Wolfsburg, Germany. Since then, he has worked on different projects in the area of driver assistance systems as a Researcher and Project Leader. He is the author or coauthor of more than 40 publications and owns several patents. His research interests include image processing and analysis dedicated to advanced comfort/safety automotive applications. Dr. Jianwei Zhang   is full professor and director of the Institute of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, Germany. He is one of the Chair Professors “Human-Computer Interaction” of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University. He received his Bachelor (1986) and Master degree (1989) from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, and his PhD (1994) from the Department of Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe, Germany. His research interests include multimodal information processing, robot learning, service robots, smart vision systems and Embodied Intelligence. In these areas he has published over 120 journal and conference papers, six book chapters and two research monographs. He leads numerous basic research and application projects, including the EU basic research programs and the Collaborative Research Centre supported by the German Research Council. Dr. Zhang has received multiple awards including the IEEE ROMAN Best Paper 2002.