IMAGING APPARATUS, VEHICLE-MOUNTED IMAGE PICKUP SYSTEM, ROAD SURFACE APPEARANCE RECOGNITION METHOD, AND OBJECT IDENTIFICATION DEVICE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an imaging apparatus which can accurately detect a boundary of a road surface with a simple configuration without depending on a photographing environment, and can provide visual display to a driver for safe driving and accurate information for vehicle control.

SOLUTION: A polarization ratio is calculated from a vertically-polarized image and a horizontally-polarized image of a road surface photographed by a polarization camera to generate a polarization ratio image. White lines WL are detected based on the brightness information of the image photographed by the polarization camera. Using the respective inside polarization ratios (reference polarization ratios for scanning), differences with the polarization ratio on the same scanning line from center to right and left of the screen, from the bottom to the top, are calculated for each scanning line, and compared with a preset threshold value to detect a road edge RE. Sections in which the difference value is within the threshold value are indicated by x marks while parts in which it is larger than the threshold value are indicated by black circles. The parts indicated by the black circles are the parts recognized as the road edge RE.

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