Alberto Broggi

• PhD
• University of Parma

The present invention relates to a method for recognizing a road user and for generating a warning. Furthermore, the invention relates to a recognition and warning system with a first camera for recording an image in the visible spectral range and a second camera for recording an image in the non-visible spectral range. The method and the detection...

A view monitoring system for a vehicle , comprising four pairs of cameras , a processing unit , a visual display unit , an obstacle detection unit and a signaling unit . The four pairs of cameras may be positioned on a front , rear , and sides of the vehicle and detect images of the same number of areas near the vehicle . The processing unit may be...

Novel advance driver assistance systems, such as emergency braking and adaptive cruise control require the most reliable detection algorithms. Furthermore, in the recent years, the use of computer vision approaches in these type of applications is becoming more frequent. However, when dealing with these technologies, reliability is a very important...

Obstacles detection is used nowdays for a number of road safety applications, increasing the drivers awareness in potential dangerous situations. A reliable and robust obstacles detection continues to be largely investigated and still remains an open challenge, especially for difficult scenarios and in general cases, with loosened constraints and m...

Three-dimensional environment perception is one of the most important tasks for an autonomous vehicle. Map-based approaches play a fundamental role in the representation of vehicle surroundings, allowing several perception features, such as obstacle detection or road classification. However, benchmarks available in literature do not allow to evalua...

A view monitoring system for a vehicle, comprising four pairs of cameras, a processing unit, a visual display unit, an obstacle detection unit and a signaling unit. The four pairs of cameras may be positioned on a front, rear, and sides of the vehicle and detect images of the same number of areas near the vehicle. The processing unit may be configu...

A lateral obstacle detection apparatus (1) for a motor vehicle (100), comprising: at least a pair of stereo cameras (2, 3) for acquiring images; a unit (4) for processing the acquired images, a support (6) for the stereo cameras (2, 3), which has an elongated shape and extends prevalently along a pre-established direction (A) that is substantially...

This paper presents an autonomous driving test held in Parma on urban roads and freeways open to regular traffic. During this test, the vehicle not only performed simple maneuvers, but it had to cope with complex driving scenarios as well, including roundabouts, junctions, pedestrian crossings, freeway junctions, and traffic lights. The test demons...

The objective of this article is to study the problem of pedestrian classification across different light spectrum domains (visible and far-infrared (FIR)) and modalities (intensity, depth and motion). In recent years, there has been a number of approaches for classifying and detecting pedestrians in both FIR and visible images, but the methods are...

One of the main challenges in intelligent vehicles concerns pedestrian detection for driving assistance. Recent experiments have showed that state-of-the-art descriptors provide better performances on the far-infrared (FIR) spectrum than on the visible one, even in daytime conditions, for pedestrian classification. In this paper, we propose a pedes...

In this work an overview of the local motion planning and dynamic perception framework within the V-Charge project is presented. This framework enables the V-Charge car to autonomously navigate in dynamic mixed-traffic scenarios. Other traffic participants are detected, classified and tracked from a combination of stereo and wide-angle monocular ca...

A method for searching for collision objects in an image recorded by a motor vehicle, characterized in that in a first method step an original image is provided on the basis of an image recorded by the motor vehicle (1), that in a second method step a resolution of the original image is reduced, whereby an intermediate image (11a) is produced that...

The reliability of a safety sensor is strongly dependent on the range the sensor is able to cover. Safety devices for electric automatic gates, mainly photodetectors, with their reduced sensing capabilities, can not provide the complete avoidance of injuries so that to guarantee protection for people crossing the danger area additional devices must...

Vehicle detection is one of the classical application among the Advance Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Applications like emergency braking or adaptive cruise control (ACC) require accurate and reliable vehicle detection. In latest years the improvements in vision detection have lead to the introduction of computer vision to detect vehicles by me...

The presence of autonomous vehicles on public roads is becoming a reality. In the last 10 years, autonomous prototypes have been confined in controlled or isolated environments, but new traffic regulations for testing and direct automotive companies interests are moving autonomous vehicles tests on real roads. This paper presents a test on public u...

This paper presents a monocular algorithm for front and rear vehicle detection, developed as part of the FP7 V-Charge project's perception system. The system is made of an AdaBoost classifier with Haar Features Decision Stump. It processes several virtual perspective images, obtained by un-warping 4 monocular fish-eye cameras mounted all-around an...

Path estimation is a big challenge for autonomous vehicle navigation, especially in unknown, dynamic environments, when road characteristics change often. 3D terrain information (e.g. stereo cameras) can provide useful hints about the traversability cost of certain regions. However, when the terrain tends to be flat and uniform, it is difficult to...

A method for generating a three dimensional grid of terrain includes receiving data representing a three-dimensional point cloud and generating a plurality of slices of the data. The method evaluates the slices using a swarm intelligence algorithm. The method is able to identify both terrain and objects. The terrain can also be identified as traver...

Autonomous Ground Vehicles designed for dynamic environments require a reliable perception of the real world, in terms of obstacle presence, position and speed. In this paper we present a flexible technique to build, in real time, a dense voxel-based map from a 3D point cloud, able to: 1) discriminate between stationary and moving obstacles; 2) pro...

Pedestrian detection is a difficult task with significant practical interests especially in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems. While the problem has been thoroughly studied from a visible, mid-wave infrared and far-wave infrared cameras perspective, little attention has been paid to the short-wave infrared spectrum. But although light...

3D laser based technology has gained in the past, with the DARPA challenges, a first player place in the arena of sensing technologies for intelligent vehicles. Today, these devices are employed successfully in many new implementations to obtain a 360 degrees view of the area around the vehicle, providing a very dense 3D point cloud that covers an...

Detecting pedestrians is still a challenging task for automotive vision systems due to the extreme variability of targets, lighting conditions, occlusion, and high-speed vehicle motion. Much research has been focused on this problem in the last ten years and detectors based on classifiers have gained a special place among the different approaches p...

This paper presents the vision of the Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (VisLab) on future automated vehicles, ranging from sensor selection up to their extensive testing. VisLab's design choices are explained using the BRAiVE autonomous vehicle prototype as an example. BRAiVE, which is specifically designed to develop, test, and...

Autonomous Ground Vehicles designed for extreme environments (e.g mining, constructions, defense, exploration applications) require a reliable estimation of terrain traversability, in terms of both terrain slope and obstacles presence. In this paper we present a new technique to build, in real time and only from a 3D points cloud, a dense terrain e...

This paper presents a new vehicle guidance paradigm based on high level commands together with a new system architecture that can handle different levels of automation. First, an overview of different automation levels spanning from manual driving to fully autonomous driving is given, then a detailed description of the digital driving paradigm is a...

Research on pedestrian detection system still presents a lot of space for improvements, both on speed and detection accuracy. This paper presents a full implementation of a pedestrian detection system, using a part-based classification for the candidates identification and a feature based tracking for increasing the result robustness. The novelty o...

In recent years the interest in autonomous vehicles has incrementally increased. After the DARPA Challenges new fields of application as agricultural, construction, mining, and also nautical are continuously opening up. In this paper a huge test is presented, the first of this kind in the history of vehicular robotics. A trip from Italy to China wi...

VisLab has been pioneering the world of autonomous driving since its early years; in 1998 VisLab organized one of the most innovative experiments for that period: a passenger car was equipped with sensing and actuation devices and was tested with autonomous steering along a 2000+ km on Italian highways [5]. VisLab then contiuned its efforts within...

This paper presents the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC), an autonomous vehicles test carried out from Parma to Shanghai between July and October 2010 by the VisLab team. The vehicle equipment is explained introducing the sensing systems which were tested during the journey. Trip details and the first statistics are presented as...

Autonomous navigation features, including fully autonomous driving, require 360 degrees perception capabilities in a variety of conditions, in order to timely react to a constantly changing scenario. The vast majority of currently available unmanned vehicles use complex sets of active sensors, installed and wired with limited constraints on their p...

This paper introduces a part-based two-stage pedestrian detector. The system finds pedestrian candidates with an AdaBoost cascade on Haar-like features. It then verifies each candidate using a part-based HOG-SVM doing first a regression and then a classification based on the estimated function output from the regression. It uses the Histogram of Or...

Trustworthiness is a key point when dealing with vehicle safety applications. In this paper an approach to a real application is presented, able to fulfill the requirements of such demanding applications. Most of commercial sensors available nowadays are usually designed to detect front vehicles but lack the ability to detect overtaking vehicles. T...

This paper presents an environment-detection-and-mapping algorithm for autonomous driving that is provided in real time and for both rural and off-road environments. Environment-detection-and-mapping algorithms have been designed to consist of two parts: 1) lane, pedestrian-crossing, and speed-bump detection algorithms using cameras and 2) obstacle...

Autonomous driving is one of the most interesting fields of research, with a number of important applications, like agricultural, military and, most significantly, safety. This paper addresses the problem of designing a general purpose path planner and its associated low level control for autonomous vehicles operating in unknown environments. Diffe...

This paper describes a speed warning system for boats moving on a wide water surface using a single grayscale camera. Boats are detected, their speed estimated, and statistics are also computed. The approach is based on an enhanced background subtraction technique combined with classification and tracking to improve robustness; it provides a stable...

Definition of the Subject and Its ImportanceThis paper presents an application of a pedestrian detection system aimed at localizing potentially dangerous situations in specific urban scenarios. The approach used in this work differs from the ones implemented in traditional pedestrian detection systems, which are designed to localize all pedestrians...

Vision-based perception has been explored as low-cost, flexible technology for industrial applications and ADAS. Its inherent flexibility presents a challenge quantifying performance and often even quantifying increases or decreases in system performance as conditions change. Experience enables designers to employ various ”rules of thumb” while com...

As interest on autonomous vehicles is growing worldwide, different approaches, based on different perception technologies and concepts, are being followed. This paper exposes the importance of the use of vision technology in most of these approaches, and presents the experience of the SNUCLE autonomous vehicle which successfully completed the Hyund...

This paper presents a vision-based method able to increase safety in access automation systems. These systems include automatic swing and sliding gates, bollards and barriers to prevent unwanted access. In current installations the anti-crushing protection is ensured by an electronic device installed on the control boards, which directly controls d...

This paper describes a method to detect and extract pedestrians trajectories in proximity of a sliding door access in order to automatically open the doors: if a pedestrian walks towards the door, the system opens the door. On the other hand if the pedestrian trajectory is parallel to the door, the system does not open. The sensor is able to self-a...

Obstacle detection by means of stereo-vision is a fundamental task in computer vision, which has spurred a lot of research over the years, especially in the field of vehicular robotics. The information provided by this class of algorithms is used both in driving assistance systems and in autonomous vehicles, so the quality of the results and the pr...

Prof. Alberto Broggi, head of VisLab, the Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, University of Parma, was awarded a five-year Advanced Investigators' Grant from the European Research Council for his laboratory project proposal, 'Open Intelligent Systems for Future Autonomous Vehicles'. The project is aimed at designing a perception l...

This paper presents the preliminary results of VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a test of autonomous driving along an unknown route from Italy to China. It took 3 months to run the entire test; all data have been logged, including all data generated by the sensors, vehicle data, and GPS info. This huge amount of information h...

When a vehicle equipped with an artificial vision system enters or exits a tunnel, the camera may temporarly suffer from reduced visibility, or even get completely blind due to quick changes in enviromental illumination. This paper presents a vision-based system that detects approaching tunnels entrances or exits. The proposed system allows other A...

This paper describes a framework used to develop and run automotive applications both on board of vehicles and in laboratory. It includes the recording system designed and implemented in the GOLD framework. The system can record data from different sensors, such as cameras, laserscanners, radars, GPS, IMU, IO boards. The system can easily be expand...

This paper presents the control system of an autonomous vehicle capable of perceiving and describing the environment using different inputs, such as GPS waypoints, roadways borders and lines, leader vehicles, and obstacles to be avoided. The controller has been implemented and tested for the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a long inte...

Reliable perception of terrain slope and terrain traversability is a key-feature for any off-road unmanned ground vehicle, as well as for any Driver Assistance Systems designed to work in extreme environments, like mining. In this paper we want to present an innovative technique to build a 3D elevation map of the traversable terrain from a world's...

This paper presents the design issues that were considered for the equipment of 4 identical autonomous vehicles that will drive themselves without human intervention on an intercontinental route for more than 13,000 km. Autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated able to reach the end of a 220 miles off-road trail (in the DARPA Grand Challenge), to...

This paper presents the TerraMax vision systems used during the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. First, a description of the different vision systems is provided, focusing on their hardware configuration, calibration method, and tasks. Then, each component is described in detail, focusing on the algorithms and sensor fusion opportunities: obstacle detec...

This paper presents an application of a pedestrian-detection system aimed at localizing potentially dangerous situations under specific urban scenarios. The approach used in this paper differs from those implemented in traditional pedestrian-detection systems, which are designed to localize all pedestrians in the area in front of the vehicle. Conve...

This chapter addresses the most important issues involved in the selection, installation, and calibration of a camera system onboard a vehicle, taking into consideration all the specific characteristics of the automotive environment and the requirements of the various applications.

This paper describes a method to detect, measure the speed, and extract statistics of boats moving on a wide water surface using a single image stream taken from grayscale camera. The approach is based on a background subtraction technique combined with classification and tracking to improve robustness; it provides a stable detection even with sea...

This paper presents the results of an innovative approach to pedestrian detection for automotive applications in which a non-reversible system is used; therefore the aim is to reach a very low false detection rate, ideally zero, by searching for pedestrians in specific areas only. The great advantages of such an approach are that pedestrian recogni...

Team Oshkosh, comprised of Oshkosh Corporation, Teledyne Scientific and Imaging Company, VisLab of the University of Parma, Ibeo Automotive Sensor GmbH, and Auburn University, participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge and was one of the eleven teams selected to compete in the final event. Through development, testing, and participation in the offic...

This chapter presents a tetravision (4-camera) system for the detection of pedestrians by means of the simultaneous use of two far infrared and visible camera stereo pairs. The main idea is to exploit the advantages of both far infrared and visible cameras to develop a system that combines the advantages of using far infrared or daylight technologi...

University, participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge and was one of the 11 teams selected to compete in the final event. Through development, testing, and participation in the official events, we experimented and demonstrated autonomous truck operations in (controlled) urban streets of California, Wisconsin, and Michigan under various climate and...

Autonomous driving in complex urban environments, including traffic merge, four-ways stop, overtaking, etc., requires a very wide range sensorial capabilities, both in angle and distance. This paper presents a vision system, designed to help merging into traffic on two-ways intersections, and able to provide a long detection distance (over 100 m) f...

This paper presents the TerraMax autonomous vehicle, which competed in the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007. The sensing system is mainly based on passive sensors, in particular four vision subsystems are used to cover a 360deg area around the vehicle, and to cope with the problems related to complex traffic scenes navigation. A trinocular system derived...

This paper presents an application of a pedestrian detection system aimed at localizing potentially dangerous situations in specific urban scenarios. The approach used in this work differs from the one implemented in traditional pedestrian detection systems, which are designed to localize all pedestrians appearing in the area in front of the vehicl...

To develop real-time vision applications for use in highly dynamic environments, such as automotive traffic, researchers must gather large amounts of data from different sensors and systems at different rates. Software capable of real-time data acquisition, synchronization, logging, and - ultimately - data processing and visualization is fundamenta...

This chapter describes the emerging robotics application field of intelligent vehicles – motor vehicles that have autonomous functions and capabilities. The chapter is organized as follows. Section51.1 provides amotivation of why the development of intelligent vehicles is important, abrief history of the field, and the potential benefits of the tec...

This paper surveys the different technologies involved in the development of computer vision applications for Intelligent Vehicles de- rived from the 15 year experience of VisLab. Some illustrative examples are also discussed.

This paper details filtering subsystem for a tetra-vision based pedestrian detection system. The complete system is based on the use of both visible and far infrared cameras; in an initial phase it produces a list of areas of attention in the images which can contain pedestrians. This list is furtherly refined using symmetry-based assumptions. Then...

This paper presents a refinement and validation stage for a tetra-vision based pedestrian detection system. The complete system is based on the use of both visible and far infrared cameras; in an initial phase it produces a list of areas of attention in the images which can contain pedestrians. Starting from the assumption that human shapes are mos...

This paper presents a road signs detection and classification system based on a three-step algorithm composed of color segmentation, shape recognition, and a neural network. The final goal of this algorithm is to detect and classify almost all road signs present along Italian roads. Color segmentation was suggested by the aim to achieve real time e...

This article presents a validator stage for a pedestrian detection system based on the use of probabilistic models for the infrared domain. Four different models are employed in order to recognize the pose of the pedestrians; open, almost open, almost closed and fully closed legs are detected. In an attempt to overcome the drawbacks of template-mat...

This article presents a shape extraction and results of a preliminary validation stage for a pedestrian detection system based on the use of active contours. The complete system is based on the use of both far infrared and visible cameras to detect areas that potentially contain pedestrians; in order to validate and filter such result a refinement...

This article presents a stereo system for the detection of pedestrians using far-infrared cameras. Since pedestrian detection in far-infrared images can be difficult in some environmental conditions, the system exploits three different detection approaches: warm area detection, edge-based detection, and disparity computation. A final validation pro...

In this paper, a method for automatic calibration of a camera stereo pair through the observation of zebra crossing signs is described. It is based on the well-known consideration that it is possible to obtain information about lens distortion and camera orientation by observing how a known pattern appears in the image; moreover, a major advantage...

The TerraMax vehicle is based on Oshkosh Truck’s Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR) truck platform and was one of the 5 vehicles able to successfully reach the finish line of the 132 miles DARPA Grand Challenge desert race. Due to its size (30,000 pounds, 27′-0″ long, 8′-4″ wide, and 8′-7″ high) and the narrow passages, TerraMax had to trav...

The technological issues and legal considerations associated with fully automated vehicles have prompted the automotive industry to focus more on supervised systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Transportation departments worldwide are concerned with social, economic, or environmental objectives aimed at enhancing fuel and road net...

This paper describes a study concerning the impact of MMX technology in the field of automatic vehicle guidance. Due to the high speed a vehicle can reach, this application field requires a very precise real-time response. After a brief description of the ARGO autonomous vehicle, the paper focuses on the requirements of this kind of application: t...

Autonomous driving in off-road environments requires an exceptionally capable sensor system, especially given that the unstructured environment does not provide many of the cues available in on-road environments. This paper presents a variable-width-baseline (up to 1.5 meters) single-frame stereo vision system for obstacle detection that can meet t...

This paper presents a sensor fusion model developed for the 2005 Grand Challenge competition, an autonomous ground vehicle race across the Mojave desert organized by DARPA1. The two sensors used in this work are a stereo vision camera pair and an ALASCA laserscanner. An algorithm to filter laserscanner's raw scan data and to remove ground reflectio...

The TerraMax vehicle is based on Oshkosh Truck's Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement truck platform and was one of the five vehicles able to successfully reach the finish line of the 132 miles DARPA Grand Challenge desert race. Due to its size (30 000 pounds, 27′0″ long, 8′4″ wide, and 8′2″ high) and the narrow passages, TerraMax had to travel slow...

The TerraMax vehicle is based on Oshkosh Truck's Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement truck platform and was one of the five vehicles able to successfully reach the finish line of the 132 miles DARPA Grand Challenge desert race. Due to its size (30 000 pounds, 27′ 0″ long, 8′ 4″ wide, and 8′ 2″ high) and the narrow passages, TerraMax had to travel s...

This paper presents a stereo vision system for the detection and distance computation of a preceding vehicle. It is divided in two major steps. Initially, a stereo vision-based algorithm is used to extract relevant three-dimensional (3-D) features in the scene, these features are investigated further in order to select the ones that belong to verti...

This paper describes an ant colony optimization approach adopted to decide on road-borders to automatically guide a vehicle developed for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2004, available from: <http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge>. Due to the complexity of off-road trails and different natural boundaries of the trails, lane markers detection schemes canno...

This report presents the research activities within the framework of N62558-05-P-0380 contract for the development of a Human Shape localization system by means of a 4-camera vision system consisting of 2 daylight and 2 far infrared cameras. The main idea is to exploit the advantages of both far infrared and visible cameras to develop a system that...

This paper describes a decision network based frame-work used for path-detection algorithm development in autonomous vehicle applications. Lane marker detection algorithms do not work in off-road environments. Off-road trails have too much complexity, with widely varying textures and many differing natural boundaries. The authors have developed a g...

The TerraMax autonomous vehicle is based on Oshkosh truck's medium tactical vehicle replacement (MTVR) truck platform and was one of the 5 vehicles able to successfully reach the finish line of the 132 miles DARPA Grand Challenge desert race. Due to its size and the narrow passages, TerraMax had to travel slowly, but its capabilities demonstrated t...