Tracking systems for intelligent road vehicles

The paper describes two mono-target tracking systems based on the control of a mixed camera/3D sensor. The 3D sensor is a laser range finder. Both systems are presented in an intelligent road vehicle context, for the purpose of obstacle detection. The first is applicable to the pedestrian tracking when the vehicle does not move. The data are obtained by a 3D segmentation process. The second tracking is used for mobile vehicle tracking. In this application, the experimental vehicle is moving, and this tracking is multisensorial, which means that it makes the most of the complementarity of both 3D and intensity data. In that case, two kinds of data are used: the distance of the obstacle obtained by a visual servoing, and the obstacle location in the intensity image given by art image processing. This tracking also involves space and temporal data alignments, which are necessary steps before any data fusion. The data combination is done by an extended Kalman filter.