A Lane Departure Warning System Based on Virtual Lane Boundary

A lane departure warning system (LDWS) should give as much warning time as possible, while triggering few, if any, false alarms. In this paper, a virtual lane boundary based LDWS (VLWM) is proposed to approach this goal. VLWM allows the driver to drift beyond the physical lane boundary by adding a virtual lane boundary. Accounting for the driving habit of the driver, lane geometry, and the local driver behavior changes, the virtual lane width is determined using a fuzzy-logic inference method. When the vehicle is predicted to exceed the virtual lane boundary, an alarm is triggered. Real world driving data are used to test the LDWSs. Compared with time-to-lane-crossing (TLC) based method, the VLWM has a much lower false alarm rate, while their warning time is almost similar. Meanwhile, VLWM has a much longer warning time than the roadside rumble strip (RRS), while the false alarm rate is almost as low as that of the RRS.