Lane Marking Detection Based on Segments with Upper and Lower Structure

Abstract

An effective and accurate lane marking detection algorithm is a fundamental element of the intelligent vehicle system and the advanced driver assistant system, which can provide important information to ensure the vehicle runs in the lane or warn the driver in case of lane departure. However, in the complex urban environment, lane markings are always affected by illumination, shadow, rut, water, other vehicles, abandoned old lane markings and non-lane markings, etc. Meanwhile, the lane markings are weak caused by hard use over time. The dash and curve lane marking detection is also a challenge. In this paper, a new lane marking detection algorithm for urban traffic is proposed. In the low-level phase, an iterative adaptive threshold method is used for image segmentation, which is especially suitable for the blurred and weakened lane markings caused by low illumination or wear. In the middle-level phase, the algorithm clusters the candidate pixels into line segments, and the upper and lower structure is used to cluster the line segments into candidate lanes, which is more suitable for curve and dashed lane markings. In the high-level phase, we compute the highest scores to get the two optimal lane markings. The optimal strategy can exclude interference similar to lane markings. We test our algorithm on Future Challenge TSD-Lane dataset and KITTI UM dataset. The results show our algorithm can effectively detect lane markings under multiple disturbance, occlusions and sharp curves.