Self-navigating vehicle equipped with lane boundary recognition system

A system for recognizing a lane boundary for a self-navigating vehicle, comprising:

• first means for capturing a view of a plurality of lanes of a roadway on which said vehicle travels to obtain an image of said plurality of lanes;
• second means for extracting a plurality of line segments from said image to recognize a plurality of boundaries of said lanes at a first time T0 and a second time T1;
• third means for assigning a reference number to one of said lane boundaries;
• fourth means for determining a distance between said vehicle and each of said lane boundaries and dividing each said distance by a value corresponding to a width of each of said lanes to produce and assign a quotient value to each of said lane boundaries;
• fifth means for determining a position of said vehicle relative to said lane boundary assigned said reference number at said first time T0 and said second time T1;
• sixth means for estimating a locus of said vehicle during a period between said first time T0 and said second time T1 to provide a corrected position of said vehicle at said first time T0 and for obtaining a difference between said corrected position at said first time T0 and said position of said vehicle at said second time T1;
• seventh means for adding said difference to said quotient value of each of said lane boundaries to produce an incremented quotient value for each of said lane boundaries and, by comparing said incremented quotient values with each other, to determine whether or not said lane boundaries recognized at said first time T0 and said lane boundaries recognized at said second time T1 are continuous, and assigning a same lane identifier when said lane boundaries recognized at said first time T0 and said lane boundaries recognized at said second time T1 are determined to be continuous;
• and
• eighth means for storing information concerning said lane identifier.

A lane boundary recognition system for use in a vehicle navigation system, said boundary recognition system comprising:

• a camera for generating an image of a roadway;
• an image processing processor coupled to said camera for converting said image generated by said camera into a digital data set representing said image and storing said data set in a memory;
• and
• an image evaluation processor coupled to said memory, said image evaluation processor being programmed to:
• extract at a first time T0 and a second time T1 a plurality of line segments each representing a lane boundary from said image of said roadway;
• assign a lane boundary number to each of said line segments;
• determine if any of said line segments extracted at said first time T0 and said line segments extracted at said second time T1 represent a continuous lane;
• and
• assign a same lane identifier to any of said line segments representing said continuous lane.

A method for use in an image evaluation processor of a vehicle self-navigation system, said method comprising the steps of:

• extracting at a first time T0 and a second time T1 a plurality of line segments each representing a lane boundary from an image of a roadway;
• assigning a lane boundary number to each of said line segments;
• determining if any of said line segments extracted at said first time T0 and said line segments extracted at said second time T1 represent a continuous lane;
• and
• assigning a same lane identifier to any of said line segments representing said continuous lane.