Robust Lane Detection for Complicated Road Environment Based on Normal Map

Detection of road or lane is indispensable for the environmental perception of advanced driver assistance systems. It has been an active field of research with a wide application prospect. However, due to the complex illumination and interferences, such as vehicles and shadows in the real driving environment, lane detection is still a challenging task today. To address these issues, a robust method for road segmentation and lane detection based on a normal map is proposed. The first step of this approach is to generate the normal map by using the depth information and then extract a segmented road pavement without vehicles and buildings based on the normal map. Second, we improve an adaptive threshold segmentation method and denoising operations to enhance the lane markings. Third, the combination of Hough transform and vanishing point makes it more accurate to determine the starting points of host lanes, and then the lanes in the following image sequence can be detected in the adaptive region of interest. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the experimental results on the data sets in two countries demonstrate that our approach produces more credible performance under various light conditions or dense traffic.