Detection and Recognition of Road Markings in Panoramic Images

The detection of road lane markings has many practical applications, such as advanced driver assistance systems and road maintenance. In this paper we propose an algorithm to detect and recognize road lane markings from panoramic images. Our algorithm consists of four steps. First, an inverse perspective mapping is applied to the image, and the potential road markings are segmented based on their intensity difference compared to the surrounding pixels. Second, we extract the distance between the center and the boundary at regular angular steps of each considered potential road marking segment into a feature vector. Third, each segment is classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). Finally, by modeling the lane markings, previous false positive detected segments can be rejected based on their orientation and position relative to the lane markings. Our experiments show that the system is capable of recognizing 93%, 95% and 91% of striped line segments, blocks and arrows respectively, as well as 94% of the lane markings.