Vanishing Point Constrained Lane Detection With a Stereo Camera

In this paper, we propose a robust vanishing-point constrained lane detection method with a stereo-rig. This method can achieve promising detection performance for both straight and curved lanes without assuming any parametric lane model. First, we propose an accurate and efficient road vanishing point detection scheme based on the v-disparity and visual odometry techniques, where the v-disparity map can significantly reduce the searching space for vanishing point, and the visual odometry can benefit the vanishing point detection of both straight and curved roads. Next, we formulate the lane detection problem as a graph-search procedure, where a vanishing-point constrained Dijkstra shortest-path lane model is proposed to obtain a minimum-cost map. The two lane borders can be detected by finding two optimal paths which originate from the vanishing point to two cost-map derived terminal points, respectively. The proposed method has been tested on the KITTI and the Oxford RobotCar data sets and it works accurately and robustly on a variety of road scenes.