Atmospheric Transmission and Thermal Inertia Induced Blind Road Segmentation with a Large-Scale Dataset TBRSD

Computer vision-based walking assistants are prominent tools for aiding visually impaired people in navigation. Blind road segmentation is a key element in these walking assistant systems. However, most walking assistant systems rely on visual light images, which is dangerous in weak illumination environments such as darkness or fog. To address this issue and enhance the safety of vision-based walking assistant systems, we developed a thermal infrared blind road segmentation neural network (TINN). In contrast to conventional segmentation techniques that primarily concentrate on enhancing feature extraction and perception, our approach is geared towards preserving the inherent radiation characteristics within the thermal imaging process. Initially, we modelled two critical factors in thermal infrared imaging - thermal light atmospheric transmission and thermal inertia effect. Subsequently, we use an encoder-decoder architecture to fuse the feathers extracted by the two modules. Additionally, to train the network and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we constructed a large-scale thermal infrared blind road segmentation dataset named TBRSD consists 5180 pixel-level manual annotations. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques and achieves state-of-the-art performance in thermal blind road segmentation, as validated on benchmark thermal infrared semantic segmentation datasets such as MFNet and SODA. The dataset and our code are both publicly available in https://github.com/chenjzBUAA/TBRSD or http://xzbai.buaa.edu.cn/datasets.html.