Crosswalk detection is an important part of the Pedestrian Protection System in autonomous vehicles. Different methods of crosswalk detection have been introduced so far using crosswalk edge features, the distance between crosswalk blocks, laser scanning, Hough Transformation, and Fourier Transformation. However, most of these methods failed to detect crosswalks accurately, when they are damaged, faded away or partly occluded. Furthermore, these methods face difficulties when applying on real road environment where there are lot of vehicles. In this paper, we solve this problem by first using a region based binarization technique and x–axis histogram to detect the candidate crosswalk areas. Then, we apply Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classification method to decide whether the candidate areas contain a crosswalk or not. Experiment results prove that our method can detect crosswalks in different environment conditions with higher recognition rate even they are faded away or partly occluded.

We investigate the role of contact location information on the perception of local features dur- ing contour following in a virtual environment. An absolute identification experiment is conducted under force-alone and force-plus-contact-location conditions to investigate the effect of the contact location in- formation. The results show that the participants identify the local features significantly better in terms of higher information transfer for the force-plus-contact-location condition, while no significant difference was found for measures of the efficacy of contour following between the two conditions. Further data analyses indicate that the improved identification of local features with contact location information is due to the improved identification of small surface features.