Lane Detection based on Contrast Analysis

Computer vision and image processing systems are ubiquitous in automotive domain and manufacturing industry. Lane detection warning systems has been an elementary part of the modern automotive industry. Due to the recent progress in the computer vision and image processing methods, economical and flexible use of computer vision is now pervasive and computing with images is not just for the realm of the science, but also for the arts and social science and even for hobbyists. Image processing is a key technology in automotive industry, even now there is hardly a single manufacturing process that is thinkable without imaging. The applications of image processing and computer vision methods in embedded systems platform, is an ongoing research area since many years. OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library containing optimized algorithms and methods for designing and implementing applications based on video and image processing techniques. These method are organized in the form of modules for specific field including, user-graphic interface, machine learning, feature extraction etc [43]. Vision-based automotive application systems become an important mechanism for lane detection and warning systems to alert a driver about the road in localization of the vehicle [1]. In automotive electronic market, for lane detection problem, vision-based approaches has been designed and developed using different electronic hardware and software components including wireless sensor, camera module, Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based systems, GPU and digital signal processors (DSP) [13]. The software module consists on the top of real-time operating systems and hardware description programming language including Verilog, or VHDL. One of the most time critical task of vision based systems is to test system applications in real physical environment with wide variety of driving scenarios and validating the whole systems as per the automotive industry standards. For validating and testing the advanced driver assistance systems, there are some commercial tools available including Assist ADTF from Elektrobit, EB company [43]. In addition to the design and strict real-time requirements for advanced driver assistance systems applications based on electronic components and embedded platform, the complexity and characteristics of the implemented algorithms are two parameters that need to be taken into consideration choosing hardware and software component [13]. The development of vision-based automotive application, based on alone electronic and micro-controller is not a feasible solution approach [35] [13] and GPU based solution are attractive but has many other issues including power consumption. In this thesis project, image and video processing module is used from OpenCV library for road lane detection problems. In proposed lane detection methods, low-level image processing algorithms and methods are used to extract relevant information for lane detection problem by applying contrast analysis at pixel level intensity values. Furthermore, the work at hand presents different approaches for solving relevant partial problems in the domain of lane detection. The aim of the work is to apply contrast analysis based on low-level image processing methods to extract relevant lane model information from the grid of intensity values of pixel elements available in image frame. The approaches presented in this project work are based on contrast analysis of binary mask image frame extracted after applying range threshold. A set of points, available in an image frame, based lane feature models are used for detecting lanes on color image frame captured from video. For the performance measurement and evaluation, the proposed methods are tested on different systems setup, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, CodeBlocks, Visual Studio 2012 and Linux based Rasbian-Jessie operating systems running on Intel i3, AMD A8 APU, and embedded systems based (Raspberry Pi 2 Model B) ARM v7 processor respectively