Road Trail Classification using Color Images for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation

Natural road trail image classification is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the natural road environment. It is useful in many real-world applications such as autonomous vehicle and robot navigation. In recent years, many researchers have explored the use of data obtained from different sensors in solving this problem. In this paper, we use image data captured from standard digital cameras, to address the road trail classification problem. To this end, we develop a database of road trail images and train an artificial neural network (ANN) classifier on features obtained using the bag-of-words (BoW) image feature extraction approach. We show experimentally that the proposed method is effective in classifying road trails.