Multiple Lane Detection via Combining Complementary Structural Constraints

Abstract

Many studies have been conducted on single lane detection, but multi-lane detection is rarely addressed. The latter is more advantageous for applications such as autonomous navigation, unmanned vehicles, departure warning, and cruise control. In this paper, we propose a novel and robust multiple lane detection algorithm based on the road structure information, which contains five complementary constraints: length constraint, parallel constraint, distribution constraint, pair constraint and uniform width constraint. All the five constraints are incorporated into a Hough transform (HT) based unified framework to select lane candidates. Nearly 99% of the false alarm candidates in HT space can be removed. Moreover, a dynamic programming strategy is proposed to find the most rational solutions among the remaining candidates. This strategy can effectively deal with combination complexity and interferences introduced by multi-lane detection. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset and other collected data demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and efficiency.