From Automatic Sign Detection To Space Usage Rules Mining For Autonomous Driving

Abstract

While there is a large body of related work on the automatic detecting of road signs for (semi-)autonomous vehicles, we believe that these vehicles should also be aware of so-called “space usage rules” (SURs) more generally. Vehicles that understand SURs – e.g. “no swimming”, “no drone flying”, - could provide a novel set of context-aware services for autonomous driving. For instance, an autonomous car navigation system could provide directions to the nearest beach, where swimming is allowed, or the system itself could know if it is allowed to send out its drone to get an overview on the current traffic situation ahead. In this workshop paper, we outline two techniques to mine these SURs. We present a visionbased technique and a technique utilizing user interfaces for encoding SUR expressed in natural language into a machine-readable format.