AURORA: a vision-based roadway departure warning system

AURORA is a vision-based system designed to warn a vehicle driver of possible impending roadway departure accidents. It employs a downward looking color video camera with a wide angle lens, a digitizer, and a portable Sun Sparc workstation. Using a binormalized adjustable template correlation algorithm, it reliably detects lane markers on structured roads at 60 Hz. A time-to-lane-crossing (TLC) measurement is calculated for each image based on the estimation of vehicle´s lateral position and velocity. This measurement is used to trigger an alarm when the TLC falls below a preset threshold. Promising results have been achieved under a variety of weather and lighting conditions, on many road types