Robust Lane Lines Detection and Quantitative Assessment

Detection of lane markings based on a camera sensor can be a low cost solution to lane departure and curve over speed warning. A number of methods and implementations have been reported in the literature. However, reliable detection is still an issue due to cast shadows, wearied and occluded markings, variable ambient lighting conditions etc. We focus on increasing the reliability of detection in two ways. Firstly, we employ a different image feature other than the commonly used edges: ridges, which we claim is better suited to this problem. Secondly, we have adapted RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair or lane lines to the image features, based on both ridgeness and ridge orientation. In addition this fitting is performed for the left and right lane lines simultaneously, thus enforcing a consistent result. We have quantitatively assessed it on synthetic but realistic video sequences for which road geometry and vehicle trajectory ground truth are known.