Hardware Accelerated Particle Filter for Lane Detection and Tracking in OpenCL

A road lane detection and tracking algorithm is developed, especially tailored to run on high-performance heterogeneous hardware like GPUs and FPGAs in autonomous road vehicles. The algorithm was initially developed in C/C++ and was ported to OpenCL which supports computation on heterogeneous hardware.A novel road lane detection algorithm is proposed using random sampling of particles modeled as straight lines. Weights are assigned to these particles based on their location in the gradient image. To improve the computation efficiency of the lane detection algorithm, lane tracking is introduced in the form of a Particle Filter. Creation of the particles in lane detection step and prediction, measurement updates in lane tracking step are computed parellelly on GPU/FPGA using OpenCL code, while the rest of the code runs on a host CPU. The software was tested on two GPUs - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 and an FPGA - Altera Stratix-V, which gave a computational frame rate of up to 104 Hz, 79 Hz and 27 Hz respectively. The code was tested on video streams from five different datasets with different scenarios of varying lighting conditions on the road, strong shadows and the presence of light to moderate traffic and was found to be robust in all the situations for detecting a single lane.Validerat; 20140128 (global_studentproject_submitter