Road Vanishing-Point Detection: A Multi-Population Genetic Algorithm Based Approach

In this paper, we propose a robust method for the fast estimation of the road vanishing point in challenging scenarios based on multiple population genetic algorithm (MPGA). The proposed method consists of three main parts: the first part is a searching method which searches for vanishing point candidates by multiple population genetic algorithm, the second part is a locally tangent-based voting method which obtains the value of the fitness function for the first part, and the last part is a local dominant texture orientation estimation method which applies Gabor filter banks to estimate the local dominant orientation of the vanishing point candidate and its voters for the second part. The proposed method has been tested on a vanishing point dataset which contains over 200 various road images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is both efficient and effective in detecting vanishing point compared with some state-of-the-art methods.