Robust hypothesis generation method using binary blob analysis for multi-lane detection

Abstract

The vision-based lane detection is an important component of advanced driver assistance systems and it is essential for lane departure warning, lane keeping, and vehicle localisation. However, it is a challenging problem to improve the robustness of multi-lane detection due to factors, such as perspective effect, possible low visibility of lanes, and partial occlusions. To deal with these issues, the authors propose an improved lane hypothesis generation method using a reliable binary blob analysis. Most existing top-view based methods focused on the lane model fitting, but they neglected the reliability of hypothesis generation and the effectiveness in challenging conditions. To cope with these shortcomings, the authors carried out vanishing point detection and inverse perspective mapping to remove the perspective effect from the road images. Then two-stage binary blob filtering and blob verification techniques using classification are introduced to improve the robustness of lane hypothesis generation for lane detection. The experimental results show that the average detection accuracy on a new challenging multi-lane dataset is 97.7%. The performance of the proposed method outperforms that of the state-of-the-art method by 1.6% in detection accuracy on the Caltech lane benchmark dataset.