Lane Boundary Detection Research Articles

Advanced Road Lane Detection System

Advanced Road Lane Detection System

An innovative method for scene recognition and target tracking for adaptive cruise control in complex traffic environment

The adaptive cruise control (ACC) system as a typical advanced driver assistant system (ADAS) has been commercially application in automotive industry for decades. An innovative method is proposed in this paper for scene recognition and target tracking for ACC application in some complex traffic environment. Firstly, a multi-sensor fusion method is established to estimate the curvature integrated by the quadratic programing (QP)-based lane boundaries detection, vehicle dynamics of lateral motion, and an improved Kalman filter (IKF) to introduce more measurement information into the feedback correction process. Then, the closet in-path vehicle (CIPV) can be selected according to the statistical distance between the tracked targets and the predicted driving path of ego vehicle. To distinguish the lane changing and curve driving behaviors, the trajectory models of obstacles are established as an ellipsoid domain equation and transformed into a regression model, which is recast as a standardized QP problem. Hence, the behaviors and scenes can be recognized effectively. To restrain the disturbance and improve the accuracy and robustness of target tracking, an [Formula: see text]-based switched tracking method is proposed by combining of the low pass filter (LPF) and [Formula: see text] theory. Finally, an accurate and robust tracker is provided for the CIPV by incorporating with four steps: IKF-based curvature fusion estimation, CIPV selection, QP-based scene recognition, and the [Formula: see text]-based observer. Moreover, two real car experiments are adopted and the results verify the effectiveness and real-time performance of the proposed method.

An Autonomous Framework for Real-Time Wrong-Way Driving Vehicle Detection from Closed-Circuit Televisions

Around 1.3 million people worldwide die each year because of road traffic crashes. There are many reasons which cause accidents, and driving in the wrong direction is one of them. In our research, we developed an autonomous framework called WrongWay-LVDC that detects wrong-way driving vehicles from closed-circuit television (CCTV) videos. The proposed WrongWay-LVDC provides several helpful features such as lane detection, correct direction validation, detecting wrong-way driving vehicles, and image capturing features. In this work, we proposed three main contributions: first, the improved algorithm for road lane boundary detection on CCTV (called improved RLB-CCTV) using the image processing technique. Second is the Distance-Based Direction Detection (DBDD) algorithm that uses the deep learning method, where the system validates and detects wrong-driving vehicles. Lastly, the Inside Boundary Image (IBI) capturing feature algorithm captures the most precise shot of the wrong-way-of-driving vehicles. As a result, the framework can run continuously and output the reports for vehicles’ driving behaviors in each area. The accuracy of our framework is 95.23%, as we tested with several CCTV videos. Moreover, the framework can be implemented on edge devices with real-time speed for functional implementation and detection in various areas.

An Enhanced System for Wrong-Way Driving Vehicle Detection with Road Boundary Detection Algorithm

Driving in the wrong direction is one of the main reasons that cause road accidents in Thailand. To efficiently detect wrong direction driving vehicles, we proposed a system that can track those moving vehicles from CCTVs using deep learning and image processing techniques. Our proposed system is composed of two main algorithms: Road Lane Boundary detection from CCTV algorithm (RLB-CCTV) and Majority-Based Correct Direction Detection algorithm (MBCDD). In this paper, we introduced the RLB-CCTV algorithm and the enhanced version of MBCDD algorithms for detecting road boundaries and wrong-direction driving vehicles. Based on our experiments, our system can identify the road lane boundary and track vehicles driving in the wrong direction on each lane with an accuracy of 96.61%.

Moment-based multi-lane detection and tracking

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.

Practical limitations of lane detection algorithm based on Hough transform in challenging scenarios

The vision-based road lane detection technique plays a key role in driver assistance system. While existing lane recognition algorithms demonstrated over 90% detection rate, the validation test was usually conducted on limited scenarios. Significant gaps still exist when applied in real-life autonomous driving. The goal of this article was to identify these gaps and to suggest research directions that can bridge them. The straight lane detection algorithm based on linear Hough transform (HT) was used in this study as an example to evaluate the possible perception issues under challenging scenarios, including various road types, different weather conditions and shades, changed lighting conditions, and so on. The study found that the HT-based algorithm presented an acceptable detection rate in simple backgrounds, such as driving on a highway or conditions showing distinguishable contrast between lane boundaries and their surroundings. However, it failed to recognize road dividing lines under varied lighting conditions. The failure was attributed to the binarization process failing to extract lane features before detections. In addition, the existing HT-based algorithm would be interfered by lane-like interferences, such as guardrails, railways, bikeways, utility poles, pedestrian sidewalks, buildings and so on. Overall, all these findings support the need for further improvements of current road lane detection algorithms to be robust against interference and illumination variations. Moreover, the widely used algorithm has the potential to raise the lane boundary detection rate if an appropriate search range restriction and illumination classification process is added.

SpinNet: Spinning convolutional network for lane boundary detection

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective framework for lane boundary detection, called SpinNet. Considering that cars or pedestrians often occlude lane boundaries and that the local features of lane boundaries are not distinctive, therefore, analyzing and collecting global context information is crucial for lane boundary detection. To this end, we design a novel spinning convolution layer and a brand-new lane parameterization branch in our network to detect lane boundaries from a global perspective. To extract features in narrow strip-shaped fields, we adopt strip-shaped convolutions with kernels which have 1 × n or n × 1 shape in the spinning convolution layer. To tackle the problem of that straight strip-shaped convolutions are only able to extract features in vertical or horizontal directions, we introduce the concept of feature map rotation to allow the convolutions to be applied in multiple directions so that more information can be collected concerning a whole lane boundary. Moreover, unlike most existing lane boundary detectors, which extract lane boundaries from segmentation masks, our lane boundary parameterization branch predicts a curve expression for the lane boundary for each pixel in the output feature map. And the network utilizes this information to predict the weights of the curve, to better form the final lane boundaries. Our framework is easy to implement and end-to-end trainable. Experiments show that our proposed SpinNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Design and FPGA implementation of dual-stage lane detection, based on Hough transform and localized stripe features

Robust, accurate and real-time detection of lane boundaries based on embedded hardware is an essential element of several driver assistant systems. In this work we present an FPGA-based dual-stage lane detection algorithm to cope with real world challenges such as cast shadows, occlusion of lane markers, brightness variations, wear, etc. In first stage, Sobel operator and adaptive threshold are used to extract lane edges, followed by Hough transform to extract the road markers. Second stage of the algorithm operates on original grayscale image and identifies stripe features near several candidate points with highest probabilities to find the landmarks. These extracted features are then used to detect the lane boundaries with high accuracy. Experimental results based on FPGA platform under various road conditions obtained from various datasets indicate that our algorithm can process about 60 frames per second for 720 pixels video input. Lane detection accuracy of 94.3% is achieved in average which may reach up to 97.8% in low congested highway during daylight.

Lane marking detection and classification with combined deep neural network for driver assistance

An efficient approach for lane marking detection and classification by the combination of convolution neural network and recurrent neural network is proposed in this paper. First, convolution neural network is trained for lane marking features extraction, and then these convolution neural network features of continuous frames are transferred to recurrent neural network model for lane boundary detection and classification in the time domain. At last, a lane boundary fitting method based on dynamic programming is proposed to improve the lane detection accuracy and robustness. The method presented generates satisfactory results of lane detection and type classification under various traffic conditions according to the experimental results, which show that the approach provided in this paper outperforms traditional methods and the total lane markings classification reached 95.21% accuracy.

Lane detection using Randomized Hough Transform

According to the report of the Royal Thai Police between 2006 and 2015, lane changing without consciousness is one of the most accident causes. To solve this problem, many methods are considered. Lane Departure Warning System (LDWS) is considered to be one of the potential solutions. LDWS is a mechanism designed to warn the driver when the vehicle begins to move out of its current lane. LDWS contains many parts including lane boundary detection, driver warning and lane marker tracking. This article focuses on the lane boundary detection part. The proposed lane boundary detection detects the lines of the image from the input video and selects the lane marker of the road surface from those lines. Standard Hough Transform (SHT) and Randomized Hough Transform (RHT) are considered in this article. They are used to extract lines of an image. SHT extracts the lines from all of the edge pixels. RHT extracts only the lines randomly picked by the point pairs from edge pixels. RHT algorithm reduces the time and memory usage when compared with SHT. The increase of the threshold value in RHT will increase the voted limit of the line that has a high possibility to be the lane marker, but it also consumes the time and memory. By comparison between SHT and RHT with the different threshold values, 500 frames of input video from the front car camera will be processed. The accuracy and the computational time of RHT are similar to those of SHT in the result of the comparison.

Lane Boundary Detection Algorithm Based on Vector Fuzzy Connectedness

In most actual autonomous guided vehicles (AGV), path finding and navigational control systems are usually implemented using images captured by cameras mounted on the vehicles. This paper presents and discusses a lane boundary detection technique that is necessary for the task of autonomous driving. In this paper, a new method called vector fuzzy connectedness (VFC) is presented to detect and estimate road lane boundaries. First, a preprocessed technique is used to obtain a skeleton image. Based on the result, the curvatures of the left and right lane boundaries are estimated, and the control points are found by the VFC method. Finally, the non-uniform b-spline (NUBS) interpolation method is introduced to construct the road lane boundaries. The proposed VFC method integrates the vector concept and fuzzy connectedness into the lane boundary detection algorithm. As shown in the example results, the proposed method can extract various road lane shapes and types from real road frames even under complex road environments. For navigation tasks, it is necessary to determine the position of the vehicle relative to the road. These results prove that the proposed detection method can assist in a number of actual AGV assistant applications. In the future, some intelligent techniques will be applied to test the AGV system with obstacle avoidance conditions on real world roads.

Efficient Lane Boundary Detection with Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Filtering.

Lane boundary detection technology has progressed rapidly over the past few decades. However, many challenges that often lead to lane detection unavailability remain to be solved. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal knowledge filtering model to detect lane boundaries in videos. To address the challenges of structure variation, large noise and complex illumination, this model incorporates prior spatial-temporal knowledge with lane appearance features to jointly identify lane boundaries. The model first extracts line segments in video frames. Two novel filters—the Crossing Point Filter (CPF) and the Structure Triangle Filter (STF)—are proposed to filter out the noisy line segments. The two filters introduce spatial structure constraints and temporal location constraints into lane detection, which represent the spatial-temporal knowledge about lanes. A straight line or curve model determined by a state machine is used to fit the line segments to finally output the lane boundaries. We collected a challenging realistic traffic scene dataset. The experimental results on this dataset and other standard dataset demonstrate the strength of our method. The proposed method has been successfully applied to our autonomous experimental vehicle.

Real-Time Lane Detection on Suburban Streets Using Visual Cue Integration

The detection of lane boundaries on suburban streets using images obtained from video constitutes a challenging task. This is mainly due to the difficulties associated with estimating the complex geometric structure of lane boundaries, the quality of lane markings as a result of wear, occlusions by traffic, and shadows caused by road-side trees and structures. Most of the existing techniques for lane boundary detection employ a single visual cue and will only work under certain conditions and where there are clear lane markings. Also, better results are achieved when there are no other on-road objects present. This paper extends our previous work and discusses a novel lane boundary detection algorithm specifically addressing the abovementioned issues through the integration of two visual cues. The first visual cue is based on stripe-like features found on lane lines extracted using a two-dimensional symmetric Gabor filter. The second visual cue is based on a texture characteristic determined using the entropy measure of the predefined neighbourhood around a lane boundary line. The visual cues are then integrated using a rule-based classifier which incorporates a modified sequential covering algorithm to improve robustness. To separate lane boundary lines from other similar features, a road mask is generated using road chromaticity values estimated from CIE L*a*b*colour transformation. Extraneous points around lane boundary lines are then removed by an outlier removal procedure based on studentized residuals. The lane boundary lines are then modelled with Bezier spline curves. To validate the algorithm, extensive experimental evaluation was carried out on suburban streets and the results are presented.

악 조건 환경에서의 강건한 차선 인식 방법

운전자 보조 시스템에서 차선 경계 검출은 매우 중요하다. 본 연구는 악조건인 환경에서 차선 경계를 검출하기 위한 강건한 방법을 제안한다. 첫 번째로 원래의 image에서 iVMD(improve Vertical Mean Distribution) Method를 이용하여 수평선을 검출하고, 수평선 하위영역 image를 결정하며, 두 번째로 Canny edge detector를 사용하여 하위 영역에서 차선 표시를 추출한다. 마지막으로, RANSAC algorithm을 이용하여 각각에 맞는 line model을 적용하기 전에, k-means clustering algorithm을 이용하여 오른쪽 왼쪽 차선을 분류 한다. 제안된 알고리즘은 변종조명, 갈라진 도로, 복잡한 차선 표시, 교통신호에 관하여 상당히 정확한 차선 검출 기능을 나타낸다. 실험결과는 제안된 방법이 악조건인 환경하에서 실시간으로 효율적인 요구 사항을 충족함을 보여준다.

Robust Lane Detection in Shadows and Low Illumination Conditions using Local Gradient Features

This paper presents a method for lane boundaries detection which is not affected by the shadows, illumination and un-even road conditions. This method is based upon processing grayscale images using local gradient features, characteris-tic spectrum of lanes, and linear prediction. Firstly, points on the adjacent right and left lane are recognized using the local gradient descriptors. A simple linear prediction model is deployed to predict the direction of lane markers. The contribution of this paper is the use of vertical gradient image without converting into binary image(using suitable thre-shold), and introduction of characteristic lane gradient spectrum within the local window to locate the preciselane marking points along the horizontal scan line over the image. Experimental results show that this method has greater tolerance to shadows and low illumination conditions. A comparison is drawn between this method and recent methods reported in the literature.

A Robust Vision-based Lane Boundaries Detection Approach for Intelligent Vehicles

A Robust Vision-based Lane Boundaries Detection Approach for Intelligent Vehicles

다중카메라와 레이저스캐너를 이용한 확장칼만필터 기반의 노면인식방법

This paper describes a method of road tracking by using a vision and laser with extracting road boundary (road lane and curb) for navigation of intelligent transport robot in structured road environments. Road boundary information plays a major role in developing such intelligent robot. For global navigation, we use a global positioning system achieved by means of a global planner and local navigation accomplished with recognizing road lane and curb which is road boundary on the road and estimating the location of lane and curb from the current robot with EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) algorithm in the road assumed that it has prior information. The complete system has been tested on the electronic vehicles which is equipped with cameras, lasers, GPS. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined laser and vision system by our approach for detecting the curb of road and lane boundary detection.