Patent ID: 7336805

Claim:
A method for assisting guidance of a motor vehicle on the basis of image data, the method comprising: acquired image data using an imaging sensor from a surrounding field of the motor vehicle; extracting from the acquired image data positional parameters of at least one potential destination relative to the motor vehicle; and calculating at least one trajectory describing an optimized travel path using the positional parameters so as to assist a subsequent vehicle guidance for at least one of the potential destinations, wherein the extracting includes: performing an edge detection and edge segmentation on the image data so as to break down the image data into a plurality of edge segments and storing interrelationships of the plurality of edge segments in a mathematical tree structure; analyzing the plurality of edge segments for the presence of a geometric object associated with a geometrical form that may at least partially describe a potential destination so as to identify one or more potential geometric objects; analyzing the one or more potential geometric objects for plausibility using a matching algorithm so as to identify one or more plausible objects; performing an additional acceptance analysis so as to identify at least one accepted object, the additional acceptance analysis including analyzing a shape of the image formation of each object in the image data based on knowledge of at least one imaging property of the imaging sensor relative to the surrounding field; and storing at least one accepted object that corresponds to a most proximate destination together with corresponding relative positional data in an object list.