• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.48-57
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• 2005

This paper presents a novel algorithm in order to extract lane-related information based on machine vision techniques. The algorithm makes up for the weak points of the former method, the Edge Distribution Function(EDF)-based approach, by introducing a Lane Boundary Pixel Extractor (LBPE) and the well-known Hough Transform(HT). The LBPE that serves as a filter to extract pixels expected to be on lane boundaries enhances the robustness of machine vision, and provides its results to the HT implementation and EDF construction. The HT forms the accumulator arrays and extracts the lane-related parameters composed of orientation and distance. Furthermore, as the histogram of edge magnitude with respect to edge orientation angle, the EDF has peaks at the orientations corresponding to lane slopes on the perspective image domain. Therefore, by fusing the results from the EDF and the HT the proposed algorithm improves the confidence of the extracted lane-related information. The system shows successful results under various degrees of illumination.

• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.171-181
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• 2005

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) A novel algorithm in order to extract lane-related information from road images is presented; 2) Design specifications of an image processing onboard unit capable of extracting lane­related information in real-time is also presented. Obtaining precise information from road images requires many features due to the effects of noise that eventually leads to long processing time. By exploiting a FPGA and DSP, we solve the problem of real-time processing. Due to the fact that image processing of road images relies largely on edge features, the FPGA is adopted in the hardware design. The schematic configuration of the FPGA is optimized in order to perform 3 $\times$ 3 Sobel edge extraction. The DSP carries out high-level image processing of recognition, decision, estimation, etc. The proposed algorithm uses edge features to define an Edge Distribution Function (EDF), which is a histogram of edge magnitude with respect to the edge orientation angle. The EDF enables the edge-related information and lane-related to be connected. The performance of the proposed system is verified through the extraction of lane-related information. The experimental results show the robustness of the proposed algorithm and a processing speed of more than 25 frames per second, which is considered quite successful.

• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.513-520
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose an approach to identify the driving environment for intelligent highway vehicles by means of image processing and computer vision techniques. The proposed approach mainly consists of two consecutive computational steps. The first step is the lane marking detection, which is used to identify the location of the host vehicle and road geometry. In this step, related standard image processing techniques are adapted for lane-related information. In the second step, by using the output from the first step, a four-stage algorithm for vehicle detection is proposed to provide information on the relative position and speed between the host vehicle and each preceding vehicle. The proposed approach has been validated in several real-world scenarios. Herein, experimental results indicate low false alarm and low false dismissal and have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed detection approach.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.435-444
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• 2005

This paper presents a lane-departure identification (LDI) algorithm for a traveling vehicle on a structured road. The algorithm makes up for the weak points of the former method based on EDF[1] by introducing a Lane Boundary Pixel Extractor (LBPE), the well known Hough transform, and liner regression. As a filter to extract pixels expected to be on lane boundaries, the LBPE plays an important role in enhancing the robustness of LDI. Utilizing the pixels from the LBPE the Hough transform provides the lane-related parameters composed of orientation and distance, which are used in the LDI. The proposed LDI is based on the fact the lane-related parameters of left and right lane boundaries are symmetrical as for as the optical axis of a camera mounted on a vehicle is coincident with the center of lane; as the axis deviates from the center of lane, the symmetrical property is correspondingly lessened. In addition, the LDI exploits a linear regression of the lane-related parameters of a series of successive images. It plays the key role of determining the trend of a vehicle's traveling direction and minimizing the noise effect. Except for the two lane-related parameters, the proposed algorithm does not use other information such as lane width, a curvature, time to lane crossing, and of feet between the center of a lane and the optical axis of a camera. The system performed successfully under various degrees of illumination and on various road types.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.1416-1418
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• 2004

This paper proposes an image processing algorithm for detecting obstacles on road-lane using DLI(disparity of lane-related information) that is generated by stereo images acquired from dual cameras mounted on a moving vehicle. The DLI is a disparity that is acquired using single lane information from road lane detection. For the purpose to reduce processing time, we use small blocks obtained by edge-histogram based blocking logic. This algorithm detects moving objects such as preceding vehicles and obstacles. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in a personal computer with the road image data of a typical highway. We successfully performed experiments under a wide variety of road conditions without changing parameter values or adding human intervention. Experimental results also showed that the proposed DLI is quite successful.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.509-516
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• 2004

This paper proposes an image processing algorithm for detecting obstacles on road using DLI(disparity of lane-related information) that is generated by stereo images acquired from dual cameras mounted on a moving vehicle. The DLI is a disparity that is acquired using a single lane information from road lane detection. For the purpose to reduce processing time, we use small block of edge-histogram based blocking logic. This algorithm detects moving objects such as preceding vehicles and obstacles. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in a personal computer with the road image data of a typical highway. We successfully performed experiments under a wide variety of road conditions without changing parameter values or adding human intervention. Experimental results also showed that the proposed DLI is quite successful.

• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.53-63
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• 2005

We propose a fuzzy neural network (FNN) theory capable of deciding the quality of a road image prior to extracting lane-related information. The accuracy of lane-related information obtained by image processing depends on the quality of the raw images, which can be classified as good or bad according to how visible the lane marks on the images are. Enhancing the accuracy of the information by an image-processing algorithm is limited due to noise corruption which makes image processing difficult. The FNN, on the other hand, decides whether road images are good or bad with respect to the degree of noise corruption. A cumulative distribution function (CDF), a function of edge histogram, is utilized to extract input parameters from the FNN according to the fact that the shape of the CDF is deeply correlated to the road image quality. A suitability analysis shows that this deep correlation exists between the parameters and the image quality. The input pattern vector of the FNN consists of nine parameters in which eight parameters are from the CDF and one is from the intensity distribution of raw images. Experimental results showed that the proposed FNN system was quite successful. We carried out simulations with real images taken in various lighting and weather conditions, and obtained successful decision-making about $99\%$ of the time.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.188-199
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• 2013

This paper presents a novel algorithm for nighttime detection of the lane markers painted on a road at night. First of all, the proposed algorithm uses neighborhood average filtering, 8-directional Sobel operator and thresholding segmentation based on OTSU's to handle raw lane images taken from a digital CCD camera. Secondly, combining intensity map and gradient map, we analyze the distribution features of pixels on boundaries of lanes in the nighttime and construct 4 feature sets for these points, which are helpful to supply with sufficient data related to lane boundaries to detect lane markers much more robustly. Then, the searching method in multiple directions- horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions, is conducted to eliminate the noise points on lane boundaries. Adapted Hough transformation is utilized to obtain the feature parameters related to the lane edge. The proposed algorithm can not only significantly improve detection performance for the lane marker, but it requires less computational power. Finally, the algorithm is proved to be reliable and robust in lane detection in a nighttime scenario.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.434-442
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a road lane color recognition method from the image obtained from a driving vehicle. In autonomous vehicle techniques, lane information becomes more important as the level of autonomous driving such as lane departure warning and dynamic lane keeping assistance is increased. In particular the lane color recognition, especially the white and the yellow lanes, is necessary technique because it is directly related to traffic accidents. In this paper, color information of lane and road area is mapped to a 2-dimensional S-color space based on lane detection. And the center of the feature distribution is obtained by using an improved mean-shift algorithm in the S-color space. The lane color is determined by using the distance between the center coordinates of the color features of the left and right lanes and the road area. In various illumination conditions, about 97% color recognition rate is achieved.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.468-476
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• 2002

The confidence of information from image processing depends on the original image quality. Enhancing the confidence by an algorithm has an essential limitation. Especially, road images are exposed to lots of noisy sources, which makes image processing difficult. We, in this paper, propose a FNN (fuzzy-neural network) capable oi deciding the quality of a road image prior to extracting lane-related information. According to the decision by the FNN, road images are classified into good or bad to extract lane-related information. A CDF (cumulative distribution function), a function of edge histogram, is utilized to construct input parameters of the FNN, it is based on the fact that the shape of the CDF and the image quality has large correlation. Input pattern vector to the FNN consists of ten parameters in which nine parameters are from the CDF and the other one is from intensity distribution of raw image. Correlation analysis shows that each parameter represents the image quality well. According to the experimental results, the proposed FNN system was quite successful. We carried out simulations with real images taken by various lighting and weather conditions and achieved about 99% successful decision-making.