A lane departure warning system based on the integration of the optical flow and hough transform methods

Development of various techniques such as lane departure warning (LDW) systems can improve traffic safety significantly. A lane departure warning system should be able to detect when the driver is in danger of departing the road and then trigger an alarm to warn the driver early enough to take corrective action. This paper presents the development of a prototype LDW system. It is mainly an image-based approach to find the vehicle´s lateral characteristics and then uses that information to establish an operation algorithm to determine whether a warning signal should be issued based on the status of the vehicle deviating from its heading lane. The system developed takes a mixed approach by integrating the Lucas-Kanade (L-K) optical flow and the Hough transform-based lane detection methods in its implementation. The L-K point tracking is used when the lane boundaries cannot be detected, while the lane detection technique is used when they become available. Even though both techniques are used in the system, only one method is activated at any given time because each technique has its own advantages and also disadvantages. The developed LDW system was road tested on I-35, US-53, and several rural highways. Overall, the system operates correctly as expected with a false alarm occurred only roughly about 1.18% of the operation time. This paper presents the system implementation together with findings.