Real time railway extraction by angle alignment measure

Rail extraction is a fundamental and important step in railway Driver Assistant System, which is now an important application of image processing. The task is challenging as the railway is exposed to different environments. This paper proposes a railway extraction scheme, using a novel connectivity measure method named Angle Alignment Measure. The proposed scheme is robust to luminance and color variation, without edge extraction process. Railways with different lengths and patterns can be extracted under various lighting and weather conditions. More importantly, the computation complexity of the proposed scheme is very low, requiring only on average 25ms to process a frame on smart phone and 5ms on desktop computer, which are significantly better than algorithms in the literature.