Patent Document ID: 10002433
Application ID: 14655698
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A boundary line recognition apparatus comprising: a camera that is installed in a vehicle to capture an image of a travel road; a boundary line candidate extraction section that extracts candidate edge points of a boundary line sectioning the travel road, on the basis of a luminance of an image captured by the camera, and extracts a candidate line of the boundary line from a series of the extracted candidate edge points; a width calculation section that calculates, in the candidate line of the boundary line extracted by the boundary line candidate extraction section, an apparent thickness of the candidate line on the image, which is an apparent perpendicular distance from one side edge of the candidate line to the other side edge of the candidate line, from a width of the candidate line in a horizontal direction of the image and an angle of the candidate line relative to a vertical direction of the image; a boundary line characteristics calculation unit that calculates a probability of the candidate line as being the boundary line to be higher, as the candidate line has a large degree of having characteristics as a boundary line; and a boundary line recognition unit that integrates the probabilities calculated by the boundary line characteristics calculation section, in respect of a plurality of the characteristics to recognize the boundary line, wherein the plurality of the characteristics of the boundary line include that a ratio of the apparent thickness calculated by the width calculation section, to a blur degree of the image is larger than a predetermined value, and wherein the boundary line characteristics calculation unit calculates the probability to be lower, as the ratio of the apparent thickness to the blur degree of the image is smaller.