Hardware Architecture Design and Implementation of IPM-based Curved Lane Detector

In this paper, we propose the architecture of an IPM based lane detector for autonomous vehicles to detect and control the driving route along the curved lane. In the IPM image, we divide the area into two fields, Far/Near Field, and the lane candidate region is detected using the Hough transform to perform the matching for the curved lane. In autonomous vehicles, various algorithms must be embedded in the system. To reduce the system resources, we proposed a method to minimize the number of memory accesses to the image and various parameters on the external memory. The proposed circuit has 96% lane recognition rate and occupies 16% LUT, 5.9% FF and 29% BRAM in Xilinx XC7Z020. It processes Full-HD image at a rate of 42 fps at a 100 MHz operating clock.