Sensing apparatus for vehicles

Abstract

A lane detection apparatus for a host vehicle, the apparatus comprising: a first sensing means, which provides a first set of data dependent upon features of a part of the road ahead of the host vehicle; a second sensing means, which provides a second set of data dependent upon features of a part of the road ahead of the host vehicle; and a processing means arranged to estimate the location of lane boundaries by interpreting the data captured by both sensing means. The second sensing means may have different performance characteristics to the first sensing means. One or more of the sensing means may include a pre-processing means, which is arranged to process the “raw” data provided by the sensing means to produce estimated lane boundary position data indicative of an estimate of the location of lane boundaries. The fusion of the data points can be performed in many ways, but in each case the principle is that more reliable raw data points or de-constructed data points are given preference over, or are more dominant than, less reliable data points. How reliable the points are at a given range is determined by allocating a weighting to the data values according to which sensing means produces the data and to what range the data values correspond.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.