Real-time recognition of corridor under varying lighting conditions for autonomous vehicle

Recognition of a working environment is critical for an autonomous vehicle such as a mobile robot to confirm its possible intelligence. Therefore it is necessary to equip a recognition system with some sensor which can get environmental information. As an effective sensor, a CCD camera is generally thought to be useful for all kinds of mobile robots. However, it is thought to be hard to use the CCD camera for visual feedback which require to acquire the information in real-time. This research presents a corridor recognition method using the unprocessed gray-scale image, termed here as raw-image, and a genetic algorithm (GA), without any image information conversion, so as to perform the recognition process in real-time. The robustness of the method against noises in the environment, and the effectiveness of the method for real-time recognition have been verified using real corridor images.