To prevent a vehicle from departing the lane in assistant or automatic steering, real-time vision-based detection of lane is studied. The system architecture, detecting principle and lane model are described. Then the detecting algorithm of the lane image is discussed in detail. In this algorithm, several proper sub-windows in one image are first selected as the processing regions. To every sub-window, by means of such steps as appropriate pre-processing, edge detection and Hough transform, etc., the lane description features are extracted. Experimental results reveal that this detection method is of good real-time, high recognition reliability and strong robustness, etc., which can provide the decision-making foundation for the following automatic or assistant steering to some extent.