Patent Document ID: 9830518
Application ID: 14424209
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A lane mark recognizing apparatus comprising: a camera mounted on a vehicle that captures an image including a driving road in front of the vehicle; and an electronic control unit including a processor configured to provide: an edge extractor that executes an edge extracting process on the image captured by the image capturing unit; a lane mark recognizer that recognizes lane marks based on edges extracted by the edge extractor; and a lane mark candidate determiner, wherein the edge extractor separately extracts, from an entire image, edges within a short-distance area in front of the vehicle and edges within a long-distance area located in front of the short-distance area, wherein the lane mark recognizer extracts straight lines based on all the edges extracted from the entire image by the edge extractor, wherein the lane mark candidate determiner determines, from among all the straight lines extracted, straight lines derived from both the edges within the short-distance area and the edges within the long-distance area as lane mark candidates, while excluding the straight lines derived only from the edges existing in the long-distance area, and wherein the lane mark recognizer recognizes, as lane marks, the edges existing within the short-distance area and the long-distance area and located on or in a vicinity of the candidate straight lines determined by the lane mark candidate determiner.