Real-time lane departure warning system based on a single FPGA

Abstract

This paper presents a camera-based lane departure warning system implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. The system is used as a driver assistance system, which effectively prevents accidents given that it is endowed with the advantages of FPGA technology, including high performance for digital image processing applications, compactness, and low cost. The main contributions of this work are threefold. (1) An improved vanishing point-based steerable filter is introduced and implemented on an FPGA device. Using the vanishing point to guide the orientation at each pixel, this algorithm works well in complex environments. (2) An improved vanishing point-based parallel Hough transform is proposed. Unlike the traditional Hough transform, our improved version moves the coordinate origin to the estimated vanishing point to reduce storage requirements and enhance detection capability. (3) A prototype based on the FPGA is developed. With improvements in the vanishing point-based steerable filter and vanishing point-based parallel Hough transform, the prototype can be used in complex weather and lighting conditions. Experiments conducted on an evaluation platform and on actual roads illustrate the effective performance of the proposed system. © 2013 An et al.; licensee Springer.