Two-Stage Racetrack Segmentation Method Using Color Feature Filtering and Superpixel-Based Convolutional Neural Network

The Széchenyi István University race car team is an active and successful participant of the Shell Eco-marathon for long time ago. The Shell introduces the autonomous vehicle category on the Eco-marathon for 2018. Our long-term goal is to make the Szenergy racing team's vehicle suitable for the autonomous category. The first milestone is to make a reliable computer vision based intelligent detection system that understands the environment of the racing car. In this paper we will present a solution for racetrack detection i.e. a fusion of image processing and neural network systems. The two-stage recognition system is at the first phase an image processing algorithm which finds the red-white and blue-white striped edge of the road, and at the second phase, a pre-trained superpixel-based neural network which recognize the road on the filtered image.