Springrobot: A prototype autonomous vehicle and its algorithms for lane detection

This paper presents the current status of the Springrobot autonomous vehicle project, whose main objective is to develop a safety-warning and driver-assistance system and an automatic pilot for rural and urban traffic environments. This system uses a high precise digital map and a combination of various sensors. The architecture and strategy for the system are briefly described and the details of lane-marking detection algorithms are presented. The R and G channels of the color image are used to form graylevel images. The size of the resulting gray image is reduced and the Sobel operator with a very low threshold is used to get a grayscale edge image. In the adaptive randomized Hough transform, pixels of the gray-edge image are sampled randomly according to their weights corresponding to their gradient magnitudes. The three-dimensional (3-D) parametric space of the curve is reduced to the two-dimensional (2-D) and the one-dimensional (1-D) space. The paired parameters in two dimensions are estimated by gradient directions and the last parameter in one dimension is used to verify the estimated parameters by histogram. The parameters are determined coarsely and quantization accuracy is increased relatively by a multiresolution strategy. Experimental results in different road scene and a comparison with other methods have proven the validity of the proposed method.