Moment-based multi-lane detection and tracking

Abstract

Lane-detection methods are still facing robustness issues when confronted with challenging road surfaces, road markings and illumination conditions. Such combined challenges occur infrequently but are crucial for driving safety. Although advanced learning-based methods (using deep learning) demonstrate an impressive performance, they rely on plenty of training images for varying scenes and their performance is limited for scenes not covered by the training data. Also, multi-lane detection is indispensable for determining the exact position of both ego-car and surrounding vehicles as well as lane changing behavior on the road. In this paper we propose a new multi-lane detection algorithm, detecting all visible lane boundaries in front of the ego-car. In contrast to the Hough transforms often used for lane boundaries detection, our approach uses moments to calculate the deflection angles and the centroids of lane segments, achieving more precise lane boundaries. We propose a novel algorithm based on moments and Kalman filtering to achieve lane tracking. State-of-the-art neural-network-based methods are compared with the proposed method concretely. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other (recently published) multi-lane detection algorithms regarding detection rate as well as accuracy.