A DISTRIBUTED APPROACH TO 3D ROAD SCENE RECOGNITION

A distributed 3D scene recognition system based on a multilevel repres entation of object models and signals is described. The solution to a recognition problem is obtained through a set of object-observation co uples at the different abstraction levels. The various system modules exchange two kinds of information: 1) top-down messages, which are use d to communicate to lower modules the predictions made on the basis of a priori knowledge on the application domain, 2) bottom-up messages, which are used to communicate to higher modules the evidence supportin g possible local solutions. A local scheme for the combination of mess age flows is defined, and messages are interpreted by using a probabil istic network of estimators of random variables. The proposed model is suitable for addressing the problem of distributed geometric reasonin g aimed at 3D road scene recognition by an autonomous vehicle. Recogni tion results include road detection and obstacle localization, togethe r with a study of the relative computational load required by differen t modules of the system. The proposed approach is currently simulated on a workstation, while an effective implementation on board of an aut onomous vehicle is under development in the contest of the CEC-EUREKA Prometheus project.