Road recognition apparatus

A road recognition apparatus mounted in a vehicle, comprising:

• a lane line recognizer configured to extract feature points from an image captured by a vehicle-mounted camera, and based on the extracted feature points, recognize lane lines that demarcate a lane of a road in which the vehicle is traveling, which lane being referred to as an own lane;
• a shape change point detector configured to detect a shape change point along each of lane lines of the own lane, at which a shape of the lane line changes;
• a turn-off lane determiner configured to, if the shape change point is detected, determine whether or not a shape changing lane line that is one of the lane lines of the own lane including the shape change point constitutes a border of a turn-off lane branching off from the own lane;
• and
• a road recognizer configured to, when the shape change point has been detected, use only feature points of the left and right lane lines of the own lane located within a distance from the own vehicle to the shape change point to recognize a shape of the own lane, before a result of determination by the turn-off lane determiner is produced.