Automatic Detection and Classification of Road Lane Markings Using Onboard Vehicular Cameras

This paper presents a new approach for road lane classification using an onboard camera. Initially, lane boundaries are detected using a linear-parabolic lane model, and an automatic on-the-fly camera calibration procedure is applied. Then, an adaptive smoothing scheme is applied to reduce noise while keeping close edges separated, and pairs of local maxima-minima of the gradient are used as cues to identify lane markings. Finally, a Bayesian classifier based on mixtures of Gaussians is applied to classify the lane markings present at each frame of a video sequence as dashed, solid, dashed solid, solid dashed, or double solid. Experimental results indicate an overall accuracy of over 96% using a variety of video sequences acquired with different devices and resolutions.