A new Real-Time Hardware Architecture for Road Line Tracking Using a Particle Filter

In this article, a new real-time hardware architecture based on real time image processing and the use of a particle filter, as the fundamental element for tracking lines of a road, is presented. To this end a hardware system has been designed on an Altera Cyclone FPGA for processing the images obtained from a PAL video camera. This paper is part of a research line into on-board safety systems for vehicles, based on reconfigurable hardware systems that allow implementing low-cost high-reliability advanced driver assistance systems. The proposal outlined in this paper detects the lane lines by means of the combined use of probabilistic and deterministic techniques, in real time, with the necessary anticipation to deploy the primary and secondary safety interaction systems, PSSIS, on board the vehicle