We propose a practical local and global path-planning algorithm for an autonomous vehicle or a car-like robot in an unknown semi-structured (or unstructured) environment, where obstacles are detected online by the vehicle's sensors. The algorithm utilizes a probabilistic method based on particle filters to estimate the dynamic obstacles' locations, a support vector machine to provide the critical points and Bezier curves to smooth the generated path. The generated path safely travels through various static and moving obstacles and satisfies the vehicle's movement constraints. The algorithm is implemented and verified on simulation software. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in complicated scenarios that posit the existence of multi moving objects.

Environment perception is an important task for intelligent vehicles applications. Typically, multiple sensors with different characteristics are employed to perceive the environment. To robustly perceive the environment, the information from the different sensors are often integrated or fused. In this article, we propose to perform the sensor fusion and registration of the LIDAR and stereo camera using the particle swarm optimization algorithm, without the aid of any external calibration objects. The proposed algorithm automatically calibrates the sensors and registers the LIDAR range image with the stereo depth image. The registered LIDAR range image functions as the disparity map for the stereo disparity estimation and results in an effective sensor fusion mechanism. Additionally, we perform the image denoising using the modified non-local means filter on the input image during the stereo disparity estimation to improve the robustness, especially at night time. To evaluate our proposed algorithm, the calibration and registration algorithm is compared with baseline algorithms on multiple datasets acquired with varying illuminations. Compared to the baseline algorithms, we show that our proposed algorithm demonstrates better accuracy. We also demonstrate that integrating the LIDAR range image within the stereo's disparity estimation results in an improved disparity map with significant reduction in the computational complexity.

This paper presents an ontology-based driving decision making system, which can promptly make safety decisions in real-world driving. Analyzing sensor data for improving autonomous driving safety has become one of the most promising issues in the autonomous vehicles research field. However, representing the sensor data in a machine understandable format for further knowledge processing still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce ontologies designed for autonomous vehicles and ontology-based knowledge base, which are used for representing knowledge of maps, driving paths, and perceived driving environments. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are developed to improve safety of autonomous vehicles by accessing to the ontology-based knowledge base. The ontologies can be reused and extended for constructing knowledge base for autonomous vehicles as well as for implementing different types of ADAS such as decision making system.

This paper presents an approach that uses the Viterbi algorithm in a stereo correspondence problem. We propose a matching process which is visualized as a trellis diagram to find the maximum a posterior result. The matching process is divided into two parts: matching the left scene to the right scene and matching the right scene to the left scene. The last result of stereo problem is selected based on the minimum error for uniqueness by a comparison between the results of the two parts of matching process. This makes the stereo matching possible without explicitly detecting occlusions. Moreover, this stereo matching algorithm can improve the accuracy of the disparity image, and it has an acceptable running time for practical applications since it uses a trellis diagram iteratively and bi-directionally. The complexity of our proposed method is shown approximately as O(N2P), in which N is the number of disparity, and P is the length of the epipolar line in both the left and right images. Our proposed method has been proved to be robust when applied to well-known samples of stereo images such as random dot, Pentagon, Tsukuba image, etc. It provides a 95.7 percent of accuracy in radius 1 (differing by 1) for the Tsukuba images.

This paper proposes a novel practical path planning framework for autonomous parking in cluttered environments with narrow passages. The proposed global path planning method is based on an improved Fast Marching algorithm to generate a path while considering the moving forward and backward maneuver. In addition, the Support Vector Machine is utilized to provide the maximum clearance from obstacles considering the vehicle dynamics to provide a safe and feasible path. The algorithm considers the most critical points in the map and the complexity of the algorithm is not affected by the shape of the obstacles. We also propose an autonomous parking scheme for different parking situation. The method is implemented on autonomous vehicle platform and validated in the real environment with narrow passages.

Three basic ideas for enhancing the performance of extended EPRML (EEPRML) are described in detail. The first is the modification of the EEPRML impulse response in order to minimize the bit error rate of read signals from magnetic recording channels. This modification can improve the signal to noise ratio (S/N) of conventional extended partial response maximum likelihood (EPRML) by approximately 1 dB. The second is the introduction of 16/17 (3;11) maximum transition run code (MTR). This code can completely eliminate error events of more than four consecutive bits from modified EEPRML error events, and reduce the probability of minimum distance error events occurring by one eighth. Finally, dominant error events such as {0e0}, {0ee0}, {0eee0}, and {0e00e0} before 16/17 (3,11) MTR decoding can be corrected by employing cyclic redundancy check code (CRCC) with soft decision decoding. The symbol "e" represents one bit error, namely, "1" to "0" or vice versa and "0" represents a correct bit. Total performance has been evaluated by computer simulations using an isolated waveform similar to actual read signals and additive white Gaussian noise. Consequently, it has been confirmed that modified EEPRML with 16/17 (3;11) MTR code and CRCC can improve the S/N of conventional EPRML by approximately 4 dB at a bit error rate of 10-6.

This paper describes an efficient face recognition method using a combination of the Radon transform and the KL expansion. In this paper, each facial image is transformed into many sets of line integrals resulting from the Radon transform in 2D space. Based on this transformation, a new face-recognition method is proposed by using many subspaces generated from the vector spaces of the Radon transform. The efficiencies of the proposed method are proved by the classification rate of 100% in the experimental results, and the reduction to O(n4) instead of O(n6) of the operation complexity in KL(Karhunen-Loeve) expansion, where n is the size of sample images.

Generalized quasi-cyclic (GQC) codes form a wide and useful class of linear codes that includes thoroughly quasi-cyclic codes, finite geometry (FG) low density parity check (LDPC) codes, and Hermitian codes. Although it is known that the systematic encoding of GQC codes is equivalent to the division algorithm in the theory of Grobner basis of modules, there has been no algorithm that computes Grobner basis for all types of GQC codes. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to compute Grobner basis for GQC codes from their parity check matrices; we call them echelon canonical form algorithm and transpose algorithm. Both algorithms require sufficiently small number of finite-field operations with the order of the third power of code-length. Each algorithm has its own characteristic. The first algorithm is composed of elementary methods and is appropriate for low-rate codes. The second algorithm is based on a novel formula and has smaller computational complexity than the first one for high-rate codes with the number of orbits (cyclic parts) less than half of the code length. Moreover, we show that a serial-in serial-out encoder architecture for FG LDPC codes is composed of linear feedback shift registers with the size of the linear order of code-length; to encode a binary codeword of length n, it takes less than 2n adder and 2n memory elements.