Performance evaluation of road detection and following algorithms

We describe a methodology for evaluating algorithms to provide quantitative information about how well road detection and road following algorithms perform. The approach relies on generating a set of standard data sets annotated with ground truth. We evaluate the algorithms used to detect roads by comparing the output of the algorithms with ground truth, which we obtain by having humans annotate the data sets used to test the algorithms. Ground truth annotations are acquired from more than one person to reduce systematic errors. Results are quantified by looking at false positive and false negative regions of the image sequences when compared with the ground truth. We describe the evaluation of a number of variants of a road detection system based on neural networks.