• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.786-792
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• 2010

This paper presents a real-time lane detection method which can accurately find the lane-mark boundaries in complex road environment. Unlike many existing methods that pay much attention on the post-processing stage to fit lane-mark position among a great deal of outliers, the proposed method aims at removing those outliers as much as possible at feature extraction stage, so that the searching space at post-processing stage can be greatly reduced. To achieve this goal, a grid-based morphology operation is firstly used to generate the regions of interest (ROI) dynamically, in which a directional edge-linking algorithm with directional edge-gap closing is proposed to link edge-pixels into edge-links which lie in the valid directions, these directional edge-links are then grouped into pairs by checking the valid lane-mark width at certain height of the image. Finally, lane-mark colors are checked inside edge-link pairs in the YUV color space, and lane-mark types are estimated employing a Bayesian probability model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in identifying lane-mark edges among heavy clutter edges in complex road environment, and the whole algorithm can achieve an accuracy rate around 92% at an average speed of 10ms/frame at the image size of $320{\times}240$.