A terrain classification method for UGV autonomous navigation based on SURF

The ability to navigate autonomously in off-road terrain is critical technology needed for unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). This paper presents a vision-based off-road terrain classification method that is robust despite environmental variation caused by weather changes. In order to cope with an overall image brightness variation, we use speeded-up robust features (SURF), and neural network classifier. Experimental results for real off-road images show that proposed method has a better performance than wavelet based one especially in case of large brightness variation.