Lane model extraction based on combination of color and edge information from car black-box images

This paper presents a procedure to extract lane line models using a set of proposed methods. Firstly, an image warping method based on homography is proposed to transform a target image into an image which is efficient to find lane pixels within a certain region in the image. Secondly, a method to use the combination of the results of edge detection and HSL (Hue, Saturation, and Lightness) transform is proposed to detect lane candidate pixels with reliability. Thirdly, erroneous candidate lane pixels are eliminated using a selection area method. Fourthly, a method to fit lane pixels to quadratic polynomials is proposed. In order to test the validity of the proposed procedure, a set of black-box images captured under varying illumination and noise conditions were used. The experimental results show that the proposed procedure could overcome the problems of color-only and edge-only based methods and extract lane pixels and model the lane line geometry effectively within less than 0.6 seconds per frame under a low-cost computing environment.