A robust lane detection and tracking method based on computer vision

This paper presents a robust method designed to detect and track a road lane from images provided by an on-board monocular monochromatic camera. The proposed lane detection approach makes use of a deformable template model to the expected lane boundaries in the image, a maximum a posteriori formulation of the lane detection problem, and a Tabu search algorithm to maximize the posterior density. The model parameters completely determine the position of the host vehicle within the lane, its heading direction and the local structure of the lane ahead. Based on the lane detection result in the first frame of the image sequence, a particle filter, having multiple hypotheses capability and performing nonlinear filtering, is used to recursively estimate the lane shape and the vehicle position in the sequence of consecutive images. Experimental results reveal that the proposed lane detection and tracking method is robust against broken lane markings, curved lanes, shadows, strong distracting edges, and occlusions in the captured road images.