Depth and Image Fusion for Road Obstacle Detection Using Stereo Camera
Real-time detection of small obstacles (e.g., hubcaps, cardboard boxes) under complex illumination and unstructured road surfaces remains challenging due to low contrast, ambiguous textures, and lack of prior knowledge. Method: This paper proposes a training-free depth-RGB collaborative detection framework. It fuses stereo-derived depth maps with RGB imagery via a multimodal superpixel fusion mechanism, jointly enhancing SLIC-guided stereo matching and fine-grained texture discrimination for small objects. The approach operates without scene priors or annotated data. Contribution/Results: The method achieves robust detection and stable tracking of static and low-speed small obstacles of arbitrary size, shape, and appearance time. Evaluated in underground parking lots, it significantly improves recall under low-contrast and dynamically varying artificial lighting conditions. By eliminating reliance on labeled datasets or domain-specific assumptions, it offers a cost-effective, highly adaptive perception solution for autonomous driving systems.