Road marking detection and classification using machine learning algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for road marking detection and classification based on machine learning algorithms. Road marking recognition is an important feature of an intelligent transportation system (ITS). Previous works are mostly developed using image processing and decisions are often made using empirical functions, which makes it difficult to be generalized. Hereby, we propose a general framework for object detection and classification, aimed at video-based intelligent transportation applications. It is a two-step approach. The detection is carried out using binarized normed gradient (BING) method. PCA network (PCANet) is employed for object classification. Both BING and PCANet are among the latest algorithms in the field of machine learning. Practically the proposed method is applied to a road marking dataset with 1,443 road images. We randomly choose 60% images for training and use the remaining 40% images for testing. Upon training, the system can detect 9 classes of road markings with an accuracy better than 96.8%. The proposed approach is readily applicable to other ITS applications.