LANE MARK RECOGNITION DEVICE

• US 20150310282A1
• Filed: 08/30/2012
• Published: 10/29/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 08/30/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (Honda Motor Company)
• Original Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (Honda Motor Company)
• Inventors: SAKAMOTO, Yosuke, YAMADA, Kentaro
• Granted Patent: US 9,830,518 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06T 2207/20061 Hough transform
• CPC Class Codes: G06T 2207/30256 Lane; Road marking
• CPC Class Codes: G06T 7/73 using feature-based methods
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/588 Recognition of the road, e.g. of lane markings; Recognition of the vehicle driving pattern in relation to the road
• CPC Class Codes: G08G 1/167 Driving aids for lane monitoring, lane changing, e.g. blind spot detection

Abstract

A lane mark recognition device detects an edge located in a proximal area in front of the vehicle, and determines a lane mark candidate on the basis of the detected edge and an edge that is located in a distal area farther than the proximal area in front of the vehicle and that is continuous with the edge. Therefore, an edge of another vehicle (leading vehicle) or the like located in the distal area in a captured image is not detected as a lane mark candidate (is excluded as a non lane mark candidate).

Claims

1. A lane mark recognizing apparatus comprising:

an image capturing unit mounted on a vehicle that captures an image including a driving road in front of the vehicle;

an edge extractor that executes an edge extracting process on the image captured by the image capturing unit;

a lane mark recognizer that recognizes lane marks based on edges extracted by the edge extractor; and

a lane mark candidate determiner that detects edges, which exist within a short-distance area in front of the vehicle, from among the edges extracted by the edge extractor, and determines lane mark candidates based on the detected edges together with edges that exist in a long-distance area located in front of said vehicle farther than the short-distance area and which are contiguous to the detected edges,

wherein the lane mark recognizer executes a lane mark recognizing process on the lane mark candidates determined by the lane mark candidate determiner.

2. The lane mark recognizing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the lane mark candidate determiner detects, as the edges that exist within the short-distance area, edges that approach the vehicle in each of prescribed times and enter into the short-distance area from the long-distance area in front of the vehicle.

3. The lane mark recognizing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein, if the edges are detected at least once in the short-distance area in front of the vehicle in a plurality of successive images that are captured by the image capturing unit, the lane mark candidate determiner detects the detected edges as the edges that exist within the short-distance area.

4. The lane mark recognizing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the vehicle includes a yaw rate sensor for the vehicle and/or a steering angle sensor for a steering wheel;

and

an area in front of the vehicle is determined based on output signals from the yaw rate sensor and/or the steering angle sensor.

5. The lane mark recognizing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the lane mark candidate determiner is arranged such that, as the vehicle speed of the vehicle becomes higher, an image range within the short-distance area in a forward direction of the vehicle is set shorter.

6. The lane mark recognizing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein an edge, which exists within the long-distance area in front of the vehicle and remains within the long-distance area after a prescribed time, is excluded so as not to be handled as a lane mark candidate.