School of Engineering and Computer Science

ECE-576

LANE DETECTION AND TRACKING

By

 PhIlipp Czeschka    Christian Kobel    Maher Youkhana

 

Nowadays image capture and image processing is a very interesting and trendsetting area. Especially for the car industry, image capture and processing play an important part in the future. Night vision system or parking assist system are just two examples which using image capture to observe the environment. A new development called lane departure warning system (see picture below) works also with a camera to capture the shoulder on the road. The lane tracking system is a simple system which provides accurate lateral lane position measurements. For the system to function properly, the roadway must have visible painted lane edge markings. The system is capable of outputting raw data in real time representing how far the painted edge line is from the center of the vehicle at an update rate of 30MHz. Many of the systems using a FPGA to analyze the data.

In an interest to show that a FPGA can be viable solution for these types of systems, our project goal is to capture pictures and tracking the color from the picture and display the picture on the panel.

For this project the CYCLONE II FPGA chip from ALTERA has been used. Furthermore to capture the picture a TRDB_D5M 5 Mega Pixel Digital Camera Development Kit and to display the picture a TRDB_LTM 4.3 Inch Digital Touch Panel Development Kit has been used. Both development Kits are provided by TERASIC.

The system will receive real time video data from the camera and convert the raw image data into a format that can be displayed on the panel. In addition to the FPGA is used to perform the choice of color.

The DE2 FPGA BOARD with the CYCLONE II FPGA chip provides the interface between the two peripheral devices and also provides the NIOS II soft core processor which is used to control the system operation and perform the image processing algorithms.