A real-time lane marking localization, tracking and communication system

In this paper, we present an in-vehicle computing system capable of localizing lane markings and communicating them to drivers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that combines the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) technique with the Hough transform to detect and recognize lane markings (i.e., lines and pictograms). Our system begins by localizing the region of interest using the MSER technique. A three-stage refinement computing algorithm is then introduced to enhance the results of MSER and to filter out undesirable information such as trees and vehicles. To achieve the requirements of real-time systems, the Progressive Probabilistic Hough Transform (PPHT) is used in the detection stage to detect line markings. Next, the recognition of the color and the form of line markings is performed; this it is based on the results of the application of the MSER to left and right line markings. The recognition of High-Occupancy Vehicle pictograms is performed using a new algorithm, based on the results of MSER regions. In the tracking stage, Kalman filter is used to track both ends of each detected line marking. Several experiments are conducted to show the efficiency of our system.