A Novel Lightweight Lane Departure Warning System Based on Computer Vision for Improving Road Safety

Abstract

With the rapid improvement of the Advanced Driver Assistant System (ADAS), autonomous driving has become one of the most common hot topics in recent years. While driving, many technologies related to autonomous driving choose to use the sensors installed on the vehicle to collect the information of road status and the environment outside. This aims to warn the driver to perceive the potential danger in the fastest time, which has become the focus of autonomous driving in recent years.

Although autonomous driving brings plenty of conveniences to people, the safety of it is still facing difficulties. During driving, even the experienced driver can not guarantee focus on the status of the road all the time. Thus, lane departure warning system (LDWS) becomes developed. The purpose of LDWS is to determine whether the vehicle is in the safe driving area. If the vehicle is out of this area, LDWS will detect it and alert the driver by the sensors, such as sound and vibration, in order to make the driver back to the safe driving area.

This thesis proposes a novel lightweight LDWS model LEHA, which divides the entire LDWS into three stages: image preprocessing, lane detection, and lane departure recognition. Different from the deep learning methods of LDWS, our LDWS model LEHA can achieve high accuracy and efficiency by relying only on simple hardware.

The image preprocessing stage aims to process the original road image to remove the noise which is irrelevant to the detection result. In this stage, we apply a novel algorithm of grayscale preprocessing to convert the road image to a grayscale image, which removes the color of it. Then, we design a binarization method to greatly extract the lane lines from the background. A newly-designed image smoothing is added to this stage to reduce most of the noise, which improves the accuracy of the following lane detection stage.

After obtaining the processed image, the lane detection stage is applied to detect and mark the lane lines. We use region of interest (ROI) to remove the irrelevant parts of the road image to reduce the detection time. After that, we introduce the Canny edge detection method, which aims to extract the edges of the lane lines. The last step of LDWS in the lane detection stage is a novel Hough transform method, the purpose of it is to detect the position of the lane and mark it.

Finally, the lane departure recognition stage is used to calculate the deviation distance between the vehicle and the centerline of the lane to determine whether the warning needs to turn on. In the last part of this paper, we present the experiment results which show the comparison results of different lane conditions. We do the statistic of the proposed LDWS accuracy in terms of detection and departure. The detection rate of our proposed LDWS is 98.2% and the departure rate of it is 99.1%. The average processing time of our proposed LDWS is 20.01 x 10⁻³s per image.