Vision-based lane sensing systems require accurate and robust sensing performance in lane detection. Besides, there exists trade-off between the computational burden and processor cost, which should be considered for implementing the systems in passenger cars. In this paper, a stereo vision-based lane detection system is developed with considering sensor configuration aspects. An inverse perspective mapping method is formulated based on the relative correspondence between the left and right cameras so that the 3-dimensional road geometry can be reconstructed in a robust manner. A new monitoring model for estimating the road geometry parameters is constructed to reduce the number of the measured signals. The selection of the sensor configuration and specifications is investigated by utilizing the characteristics of standard highways. Based on the sensor configurations, it is shown that appropriate sensing region on the camera image coordinate can be determined. The proposed system is implemented on a passenger car and verified experimentally.