Objective Tire Footprint Segmentation Assessment from High-Speed Videos

The tire establishes the contact between the vehicle and the road. It transmits all forces and moments to the road via its contact patch or footprint and vice versa. The visual inspection of this contact patch using modern optical equipment and image processing techniques is essential for evaluating tire performance. Quantitative image-based analysis can be useful for accurate determination of tire footprint under various operating conditions. Very frequently, methods used in tire footprint segmentation cannot be assessed quantitatively due to the lack of a reference contact area to which the different algorithms could be compared. In this work, we present a novel methodology to characterize the dynamic tire footprint and evaluate the quality of its segmentation from various video sequences in the absence of a ground truth.