Patent ID: 9123242
Filing Date: 2015-09-01
Classification: G06K,G08G,H04N

Abstract:
1. A pavement marker recognition device mounted on a vehicle for recognizing a plurality of types of pavement markers of a road based on an image obtained by capturing the surface of the road ahead of the vehicle, the pavement marker recognition device comprising: a correspondence table data storage unit which stores, in advance, a road shape and pavement marker correspondence table showing correspondence relationships between the plurality of types of pavement markers and road shapes; a car-mounted camera which captures simultaneously a road shape and a surface of the road on which the vehicle is actually traveling; and a computer, wherein the computer operates: a road shape analysis unit which is configured to analyze the road shape from an image of the shape of the road captured by the car-mounted camera; a pavement marker candidate extraction unit which is configured to extract, in addition to an image area having a feature coincides with a feature of a pavement marker, an image area having a feature similar to a feature of the pavement marker although it is worn off from the image of the road shape captured by the car-mounted camera as a pavement marker candidate area; and a pavement marker verification unit which is configured to determine whether or not the pavement marker candidate area extracted by the pavement marker candidate extraction unit and the road shape analyzed by the road shape analysis unit are in a correspondence relationship shown in the road shape and pavement marker correspondence table of the correspondence table data storage unit, and based on the determination result, recognize the pavement marker candidate area as a true pavement marker, wherein the pavement marker candidate extraction unit is further configured to create a pavement marker recognition dictionary from a plurality of pavement marker patterns by a statistical learning method and extract an image area having the highest consistency with the pavement marker recognition dictionary from the image captured by the car-mounted camera.