Obstacle detection is the basis for the Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) to take obstacle avoidance measures. However, it is a very essential and challenging task to detect unexpected obstacles on the road. To this end, an unexpected obstacle detection method based on computer vision is proposed. We first present two independent methods for the detection of unexpected obstacles: a semantic segmentation method that can highlight the contextual information of unexpected obstacles on the road and an open-set recognition algorithm that can distinguish known and unknown classes according to the uncertainty degree. Then, the detection results of the two methods are input into the Bayesian framework in the form of probabilities for the final decision. Since there is a big difference between semantic and uncertainty information, the fusion results reflect the respective advantages of the two methods. The proposed method is tested on the Lost and Found dataset and evaluated by comparing it with the various obstacle detection methods and fusion strategies. The results show that our method improves the detection rate while maintaining a relatively low false-positive rate. Especially when detecting unexpected long-distance obstacles, the fusion method outperforms the independent methods and keeps a high detection rate.

Obstacle detection is the primary task of the Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS). However, it is very difficult to achieve accurate obstacle detection in complex traffic scenes. To this end, this paper proposes an obstacle detection method based on the local spatial features of point clouds. Firstly, the local spatial point cloud of a superpixel is obtained through stereo matching and the SLIC image segmentation algorithm. Then, the probability of the obstacle in the corresponding area is estimated from the spatial feature information of the local plane normal vector and the superpixel point-cloud height, respectively. Finally, the detection results of the two methods are input into the Bayesian framework in the form of probabilities for the final decision. In order to describe the traffic scene efficiently and accurately, the detection results are further transformed into a multi-layer stixel representation. We carried out experiments on the KITTI dataset and compared several obstacle detection methods. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has advantages in terms of its Pixel-wise True Positive Rate (PTPR) and Pixel-wise False Positive Rate (PFPR), particularly in complex traffic scenes, such as uneven roads.