Realtime Roadboundary Detection for Urban Areas

In the context of driver assistance systems lane detection systems are used for lane departure warning and lane centering functions. In some cases, especially in urban scenarios, no lane marks are available and for some circumstances lane marks are not sufficient to assist the driver. For novel urban functions it is necessary to know in which areas the car can operate. This problem requires detecting the free space as a traversable area for vehicles and has to take into account small objects such as curbstones. In this paper we present a real-time road boundary detection for urban areas to realize an easy lane recognition algorithm by using a series hardware stereo camera system. The algorithm is based on dense stereo information.