Detection of the Road Area at the Ordinary Road

In the field of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems), it is important to automate the cruising and safety driving. We consider to detection the area of the cruising lane of the vehicles. The method has been presented to detect the road area uses the division line such as the white or yellow marking line. Although, when we regard to the ordinary road environment, we suppose that the division lines don’t always exist on the road. Therefore, we propose a method to detect the road area where the vehicle can cruise regardless of the division line at ordinary road. When we assume that the camera is carried in the vehicle, the road area exists in the front, appears at center of images, and occupies the large region in the image. Then, we use the features of road surface, for example, the position and size, to decide the region where the vehicle can cruise. Furthermore, our method corresponds to the change of sunlight by determining some threshold values automatically.