Teaching a computer to see, has wide varieties of applications. In the context of a self driving car, on seeing the below picture, the car has to know where the lanes are, in order to navigate safely

Test Image From Udacity’s Self Driving Car Nano-Degree course

We will look at a few techniques to find lane lines.

Techniques

1. Color Thresholding
2. Region Masking
3. Canny Edge Detection
4. Hough Transformation

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Color Thresholding

A coloured image is made of a stack of 3 images, each corresponding to red, green and blue channels. The above image can be split into three separate images as shown below

Image split into 3 channels

An image is a matrix of pixels, whose values range from 0 (dark) to 255 (white).

Since lanes are white markings on the road, these can be identified, by filtering out pixels, whose values are less than a certain threshold. By choosing the right thresholds, the following output can be produced.

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