Lane detection using spline model

In this paper, a Catmull-Rom spline-based lane model which describes the pe rspective effect of parallel lines has been proposed for generic lane bound ary. Since Catmull-Rom spline can form arbitrary shapes by different sets o f control points, it can describe a wider range of lane structures compared with other lane models, i.e. straight and parabolic models. Moreover. the lane detection problem has been formulated here as the problem of determini ng the set of control points of lane model. The proposed algorithm first de tects the vanishing point (line) by using a Hough-like technique and then s olves the lane detection problem by suggesting a maximum likelihood approac h. Also, we have employed a multi-resolution strategy for rapidly achieving an accurate solution. This coarse-to-fine matching offers us an acceptable solution at an affordable computational cost, and thus speeds up the proce ss of lane detection. As a result, the proposed method is robust to noise, shadows, and illumination variations in the captured road images, and is al so applicable to both the marked and the unmarked roads. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.