Multi-Lane Detection and Tracking Using Temporal-Spatial Model and Particle Filtering

Abstract

Since vision-based methods are vulnerable to challenging environmental conditions such as bad whether, shadows, occlusions and illumination, robustness is important. In this paper, a robust algorithm for detecting and tracking multiple lanes with arbitrary shape is proposed. We extend previous lane detection and tracking processes from the spatial domain to the temporal-spatial domain using our more robust and general multiple lane model. Distinct from traditional image pre-processing procedures, we adopt slice images generated from image sequence decomposition and reconstruction that contains important structured historical information. In this domain, we propose assumptions to reduce the algorithm’s complexity and computation further. First, instead of common binarization, a more general lane marker detector is proposed with weak constraints to obtain cleaner binary image. Then, the lane marker candidates are used as the initialization of following particle filtering tracking process. We propose a confidence map computed from binary slice images by using an improved distance transform for particles sampling and weights calculation. The multi-lane model supports the use of multiple independent particle filters for tracking each lane boundary separately. Finally, a range of experimental results on testing dataset indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective with high performance and comparing with other methods, it has better tolerance to challenging environments.