Patent ID: 8306270

Claim:
A vehicle travel support device configured to recognize a travel environment of a vehicle according to an image indicating a situation in a travel direction of the vehicle which is obtained by an imaging device mounted in the vehicle, comprising: a first processing element configured to generate an edge image through performing on the image an edge extraction process which extracts a line segment with a luminance varying greater than a threshold in a scanning direction as an edge, a second processing element configured to perform a Hough transform process on the edge image generated by the first processing element and evaluate a vote value of a line segment in a ρ-θ space according to the Hough transform result, and a third processing element configured to determine the presence of a recognition inhibiting factor which reduces recognition accuracy of a lane mark on a road where the vehicle is traveling according to whether or not the votes of a specified vote value evaluated by the second processing element in a specified region denoting a predicted travel region of the vehicle in the real space is equal to or greater than a threshold in the ρ-θ space, wherein a boundary of the specified region is set in such a way that the votes of the specified vote value is smaller than the threshold in the specified region for a road without the presence of the recognition inhibiting factor of the lane mark.