Estimation of the Free Space in Front of a Moving Vehicle

There are more and more systems emerging making use of measurements from a forward looking radar and a forward looking camera. It is by now well known how to exploit this data in order to compute estimates of the road geometry, tracking leading vehicles, etc. However, there is valuable information present in the radar concerning stationary objects, that is typically not used. The present work shows how radar measurements of stationary objects can be used to obtain a reliable estimate of the free space in front of a moving vehicle. The approach has been evaluated on real data from highways and rural roads in Sweden.