Patent ID: 8121350

Claim:
An apparatus for determining a position on the basis of a camera image from a camera, comprising: a Hough transformer formed to identify circular arcs or elliptical arcs in the camera image or in a preprocessed version of the camera image derived therefrom, and to identify a plurality of straight stretches passing in various directions through the camera image or through the preprocessed version, wherein the Hough transformer is formed to provide information on a location of an identified circular arc or elliptical arc, and to provide information on a radius of curvature of the identified circular arc or elliptical arc; a positional description establisher formed to acquire a positional description describing the identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs and the identified straight stretches by parameters, on the basis of the identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs and on the identified straight stretches, wherein the positional description for identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs comprises information on a location of an identified circular arc or elliptical arc and information on a radius of curvature of the identified circular arc or elliptical arc; and a database comparator formed to compare the positional description with a plurality of comparative positional descriptions, and to acquire information on a position as a result of the comparison, wherein the database comparator is formed to form a difference between a feature vector of the positional description and feature vectors of the comparative positional descriptions, and to output, as the result, positional information belonging to the corresponding comparative positional description in response to the difference for one of the comparative positional descriptions being sufficiently small.