Road lane recognition system for RCAS

Road-lane recognition is one of the key technologies utilized in the Intelligent Transport System (ITS), a sophisticated road traffic information system in Japan. In this paper, we will take a general view of road-lane recognition methods that use image processing with reference to the recognition frames of capturing, conversion, classification and interpretation. While these recognition methods employ a bottom-up processing approach, we believe a top-down processing approach based on prior knowledge of the recognition target will play a more important role in the future. One of the purposes of road-lane recognition in Rear-end Collision Avoidance System (RCAS) is to determine whether the vehicle in front is in the same lane or not. As a solution to that question, we will introduce a network type fusion method, which divides a recognition process into modules connected in a network and then uses the changes of state obtained in mutual tests to determine the vehicle's position relative to the road lane.