Detection of multiple lane markings on road surfaces is an important aspect of autonomous vehicles. Although a number of approaches have been proposed to detect lanes, detecting multiple lane markings, particularly across a large number of frames and under varying lighting conditions, in a consistent manner is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting multiple lanes across a large number of frames and under various lighting conditions. Instead of resorting to the conventional approach of processing each frame to detect lanes, we treat the overall problem as a multitarget tracking problem across space and time using the integrated probabilistic data association filter (IPDAF) as our basis filter. We use the intensity of the pixels as an augmented feature to correctly group multiple lane markings using the Hough transform. By representing these extracted lane markings as splines, we then identify a set of control points, which becomes a set of targets to be tracked over a period of time, and thus across a large number of frames. We evaluate our approach on two different fronts, covering both model- and machine-learning-based approaches, using two different datasets, namely the Caltech and TuSimple lane detection datasets, respectively. When tested against model-based approach, the proposed approach can offer as much as 5%, 12%, and 3% improvements on the true positive, false positive, and false positives per frame rates compared to the best alternative approach, respectively. When compared against a state-of-the-art machine learning technique, particularly against a supervised learning method, the proposed approach offers 57%, 31%, 4%, and 9× improvements on the false positive, false negative, accuracy, and frame rates. Furthemore, the proposed approach retains the explainability, or in other words, the cause of actions of the proposed approach can easily be understood or explained.
Keywords: Hough transform; curve fitting; integrated probability data association (IPDA); maximum a posteriori (MAP); multilane tracking; probability density function (PDF).