Patent ID: 8917904

Claim:
A method for vehicle clear path detection using a camera comprising: imaging a ground area in front of said vehicle with said camera to produce a ground image; and analyzing said ground image by grouping all individual objects upon ground together as part of an overall uniform limitation and subtracting the overall uniform limitation from said ground image to formulate a clear path free of objects limiting travel of said vehicle including iteratively identifying a component patch of said ground image, each iteration corresponding to a different component patch identified, extracting, during each iteration, a feature from respective ones of said component patches, and classifying each of said component patches based upon respective ones of said features, said classifying comprising determining, during each iteration for each of said component patches, a respective patch clear path likelihood describing a fractional confidence that said respective feature is indicative of a clear path free of all objects limiting travel of said vehicle, wherein each respective patch clear path likelihood is determined by analyzing raw features a-priori during a training stage using a training set of images to obtain distinguishing features, and assigning the respective clear path likelihood of said respective feature based on the distinguishing features obtained during the training stage, comparing, during each iteration for each of said component patches, said respective patch clear path likelihood to a threshold clear path confidence, said threshold clear path confidence is a predetermined value constant for all determined patch clear path likelihoods, designating respective ones of said component patches as clear if respective ones of said patch clear path likelihoods are greater than said threshold clear path confidence, and designating respective ones of said component patches as not clear if respective ones of said patch clear path likelihoods are not greater than said threshold clear path confidence, wherein each component patch designated as not clear comprises part of the overall uniform limitation subtracted from said ground image to formulate said clear path.