Patent ID: 8305445

Claim:
A lane marker recognizing apparatus equipped with an image acquiring means for acquiring road image via an imaging means mounted on a vehicle, which recognizes a lane marker discretely provided on the road from the acquired road image, comprising: a candidate region extracting means for extracting a region having the possibility of being an image portion of the lane marker, from the road image, as a lane marker candidate region; a real space representative point calculating means for determining a representative point of the lane marker candidate region in accordance with a predetermined condition, and calculating a real space position corresponding to the representative point as a real space representative point; a grouping means for forming, in the case where a plurality of the real space representative points is calculated, one group of the real space representative points from the plurality of the real space representative points having a relative distance within a predetermined range set according to standards on the lane marker; and a lane marker position recognizing means for recognizing the position of the lane marker on the basis of the plurality of the real space representative points formed into the one group of the real space representative points by the grouping means, the lane marker position recognizing means comprising a group representative point calculating means for calculating a group representative point of the group, wherein the lane marker position recognizing means recognizes the position of each lane marker of a plurality of lane markers, in the case where there exists a plurality of groups having a same number of the real space representative points constituting the group and where a distance between the group representative points of the groups is equal to or greater than a first threshold and is less than a second threshold, on the basis of the real space representative points constituting said plurality of the groups.