Detecting road lane is one of the key processes in vision-based driving assistance system and autonomous vehicle system. The main purpose of the lane detection process is to estimate car position relative to the lane so that it can provide a warning to the driver if the car starts departing the lane. This process is useful not only to enhance safe driving but also in self-driving car system. A novel approach to lane detection method using image processing techniques is presented in this research. The method minimizes the complexity of computation by the use of prior knowledge of color, intensity and the shape of the lane marks. By using prior knowledge, the detection process requires only two different analyses which are pixel intensity analysis and color component analysis. The method starts with searching a strong pair of edges along the horizontal line of road image. Once the strong edge is detected the process continues with color analysis on pixels that lie between the edges to check whether the pixels belong to a lane or not. The process is repeated for different positions of horizontal lines covering the road image. The method was successfully tested on selected 20 road images collected from internet.