A real-time detection method for the driving direction points of a low speed processor

In this paper, the real-time detection method of a DDP (Driving Direction Point) is proposed for an unmanned vehicle to safely follow the center of the road. Since the DDP is defined as a center point between two lanes, the lane is first detected using a web camera. For robust detection of the lane, the binary thresholding and the labeling methods are applied to the color camera image as image preprocessing. From the preprocessed image, the lane is detected, taking the intrinsic characteristics of the lane such as width into consideration. If both lanes are detected, the DDP can be directly obtained from the preprocessed image. However, if one lane is detected, the DDP is obtained from the inverse perspective image to guarantee reliability. To verify the proposed method, several experiments to detect the DDPs are carried out using a 4 wheeled vehicle ERP-42 with a web camera.