Lane Line Extraction in Raining Weather Images by Ridge Edge Detection with Improved MSR and Hessian Matrix

Abstract

To accurately detect lane lines in road traffic images at raining weather, a edge detection based method is studied, which mainly includes four algorithms. (1) Firstly an image is enhanced by an improved Retinex algorithm; (2) Then, an algorithm based on the Hessian matrix is applied to strengthen lane lines; (3) To extract the feature points of a lane line, a ridge edge detection algorithm based on five line detection in four directions is proposed, in which, in light on the possible positions of lane lines in the image, it detects the maximum gray level points in the local area of the detecting point within the pre-set valid detection region; and (4) After the noise removal based on the minimum circumscribed rectangles, the candidate points of lane lines are connected as segments, and for the gap filling between segments, in order to make connection correctly, the algorithm makes the filling in two steps, short gap and long gap fillings, and the long gap filling is made on the combination of segment angle difference and gap distance and gap angle. By testing hundreds of images of the lane lines at raining weather and by comparing several traditional image enhancement and segmentation algorithms, the new method of the lane line detection can produce the satisfactory results.