Modern cars are often equipped with sensors like radar, infrared cameras and stereo cameras that collect information about its surroundings. By using a stereo camera, it is possible to receive information about the distance to points in front of the car. This information can be used to estimate the height of the predicted path of the car. An application which does this is the stereo based Road surface preview (RSP) algorithm. By using the output from the RSP algorithm it is possible to use active suspension control, which controls the vertical movement of the wheels relative to the chassis. This application primarily makes the driving experience more comfortable, but also extends the durability of the vehicle. The idea behind this Master’s thesis is to create an evaluation tool for the RSP algorithm, which can be used at arbitrary roads.  The thesis describes the proposed evaluation tool, where focus has been to make an accurate comparison of camera data received from the RSP algorithm and laser data used as ground truth in this thesis. Since the tool shall be used at the company proposing this thesis, focus has also been on making the tool user friendly. The report discusses the proposed methods, possible sources to errors and improvements. The evaluation tool considered in this thesis shows good results for the available test data, which made it possible to include an investigation of a possible improvement of the RSP algorithm.

Recently, sensors such as radars and cameras have been widely used in automotives, especially in Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), to collect information about the vehicle's surroundings. Stereo cameras are very popular as they could be used passively to construct a 3D representation of the scene in front of the car. This allowed the development of several ADAS algorithms that need 3D information to perform their tasks. One interesting application is Road Surface Preview (RSP) where the task is to estimate the road height along the future path of the vehicle. An active suspension control unit can then use this information to regulate the suspension, improving driving comfort, extending the durabilitiy of the vehicle and warning the driver about potential risks on the road surface. Stereo cameras have been successfully used in RSP and have demonstrated very good performance. However, the main disadvantages of stereo cameras are their high production cost and high power consumption. This limits installing several ADAS features in economy-class vehicles. A less expensive alternative are monocular cameras which have a significantly lower cost and power consumption. Therefore, this thesis investigates the possibility of solving the Road Surface Preview task using a monocular camera. We try two different approaches: structure-from-motion and Convolutional Neural Networks.The proposed methods are evaluated against the stereo-based system. Experiments show that both structure-from-motion and CNNs have a good potential for solving the problem, but they are not yet reliable enough to be a complete solution to the RSP task and be used in an active suspension control unit.