Gradient-Based Auto-Exposure Control Applied to a Self-Driving Car

As vision plays a central role in the operation of autonomous cars, one key challenge is that the limited dynamic range of camera sensors can only capture a certain portion of the scene radiance. This can lead to loss of information from images, which affects the performance of autonomous cars. To address this, we present an implementation of an exposure compensation method from the literature to auto-adjust camera exposure for the cameras mounted on a self-driving car. Furthermore, we extend this algorithm to incorporate gain compensation. The algorithm dynamically changes camera exposure time and gain settings with the intent to maximize image gradient information. The algorithm was evaluated in both indoor and outdoor environments, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation. An open-source implementation of our technique is provided.