Lane detection, the process of identifying lane markings as approximated curves, is widely used for lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control in autonomous vehicles. The popular pipeline that solves it in two steps -- feature extraction plus post-processing, while useful, is too inefficient and flawed in learning the global context and lanes' long and thin structures. To tackle these issues, we propose an end-to-end method that directly outputs parameters of a lane shape model, using a network built with a transformer to learn richer structures and context. The lane shape model is formulated based on road structures and camera pose, providing physical interpretation for parameters of network output. The transformer models non-local interactions with a self-attention mechanism to capture slender structures and global context. The proposed method is validated on the TuSimple benchmark and shows state-of-the-art accuracy with the most lightweight model size and fastest speed. Additionally, our method shows excellent adaptability to a challenging self-collected lane detection dataset, showing its powerful deployment potential in real applications. Codes are available at https://github.com/liuruijin17/LSTR.
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）
We present Laneformer, a conceptually simple yet powerful transformer-based architecture tailored for lane detection that is a long-standing research topic for visual perception in autonomous driving. The dominant paradigms rely on purely CNN-based architectures which often fail in incorporating relations of long-range lane points and global contexts induced by surrounding objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). Inspired by recent advances of the transformer encoder-decoder architecture in various vision tasks, we move forwards to design a new end-to-end Laneformer architecture that revolutioni…
Lane detection is one of the core functions in autonomous driving and has aroused widespread attention recently. The networks to segment lane instances, especially with bad appearance, must be able to explore lane distribution properties. Most existing methods tend to resort to CNN-based techniques. A few have a try on incorporating the recent adorable, the seq2seq Transformer \cite{transformer}. However, their innate drawbacks of weak global information collection ability and exorbitant computation overhead prohibit a wide range of the further applications. In this work, we propose Atrous Tra…
Accurate detection of lane and road markings is a task of great importance for intelligent vehicles. In existing approaches, the detection accuracy often degrades with the increasing distance. This is due to the fact that distant lane and road markings occupy a small number of pixels in the image, and scales of lane and road markings are inconsistent at various distances and perspectives. The Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) can be used to eliminate the perspective distortion, but the inherent interpolation can lead to artifacts especially around distant lane and road markings and thus has a …
Lane detection is one of the fundamental modules in self-driving. In this paper we employ a transformer-only method for lane detection, thus it could benefit from the blooming development of fully vision transformer and achieve the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both CULane and TuSimple benchmarks, by fine-tuning the weight fully pre-trained on large datasets. More importantly, this paper proposes a novel and general framework called PriorLane, which is used to enhance the segmentation performance of the fully vision transformer by introducing the low-cost local prior knowledge. Specif…
SparseLaneSTP: Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Priors with Sparse Transformers for 3D Lane Detection
Bosch Mobility Solutions, Robert Bosch GmbH（博世移动解决方案，罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Institute of Neuro- and Bioinformatics, University of Lübeck（神经与生物医学研究所，吕贝克大学）；Institute for Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart（信号处理与系统理论研究所，斯图加特大学）
LMT-Net: Lane Model Transformer Network for Automated HD Mapping from Sparse Vehicle Observations
Mercedes-Benz AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰股份公司）；Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America（梅赛德斯-奔驰北美研发中心）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Methods for 3D lane detection have been recently proposed to address the issue of inaccurate lane layouts in many autonomous driving scenarios (uphill/downhill, bump, etc.). Previous work struggled in complex cases due to their simple designs of the spatial transformation between front view and bird's eye view (BEV) and the lack of a realistic dataset. Towards these issues, we present PersFormer: an end-to-end monocular 3D lane detector with a novel Transformer-based spatial feature transformation module. Our model generates BEV features by attending to related front-view local regions with ca…
Lane Departure Accident Prevention in Foggy Conditions: A Prior-Guided Dynamic Feature Fusion Transformer Framework for Real-Time Lane Detection
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Transportation System, School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（广东省智能交通系统重点实验室，智能系统工程学院，中山大学）；School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology（土木工程与交通学院，华南理工大学）；College of Automotive Studies, Tongji University（汽车研究学院，同济大学）；College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University（交通运输工程学院，同济大学）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta（土木与环境工程系，阿尔伯塔大学）；State Key Laboratory of Automotive Chassis Integration and Bionics, Jilin University（汽车底盘集成与生物力学国家重点实验室，吉林大学）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute（香港科技大学深港协同创新研究院）
With the fast development of autonomous driving technologies, there is an increasing demand for high-definition (HD) maps, which provide reliable and robust prior information about the static part of the traffic environments. As one of the important elements in HD maps, road lane centerline is critical for downstream tasks, such as prediction and planning. Manually annotating centerlines for road lanes in HD maps is labor-intensive, expensive and inefficient, severely restricting the wide applications of autonomous driving systems. Previous work seldom explores the lane centerline detection pr…
National Central University（国立中央大学）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Auburn University（奥本大学）
Reasoning about vehicle path prediction is an essential and challenging problem for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems. There exist many research works for path prediction. However, most of them do not use lane information and are not based on the Transformer architecture. By utilizing different types of data collected from sensors equipped on the self-driving vehicles, we propose a path prediction system named Multi-modal Transformer Path Prediction (MTPP) that aims to predict long-term future trajectory of target agents. To achieve more accurate path prediction, the Transformer…
NullMax；School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学计算机与人工智能学院）
3D lane detection is an integral part of autonomous driving systems. Previous CNN and Transformer-based methods usually first generate a bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map from the front view image, and then use a sub-network with BEV feature map as input to predict 3D lanes. Such approaches require an explicit view transformation between BEV and front view, which itself is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose CurveFormer, a single-stage Transformer-based method that directly calculates 3D lane parameters and can circumvent the difficult view transformation step. Specifically,…
Peking University（北京大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, whi…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；College of Information Engineering, Capital Normal University（首都师范大学信息工程学院）；Shenzhen Forward Innovation Digital Technology Co. Ltd（深圳前向创新数字技术有限公司）
Detecting 3D lanes from the camera is a rising problem for autonomous vehicles. In this task, the correct camera pose is the key to generating accurate lanes, which can transform an image from perspective-view to the top-view. With this transformation, we can get rid of the perspective effects so that 3D lanes would look similar and can accurately be fitted by low-order polynomials. However, mainstream 3D lane detectors rely on perfect camera poses provided by other sensors, which is expensive and encounters multi-sensor calibration issues. To overcome this problem, we propose to predict 3D la…
As one of the most important tasks in autonomous driving systems, ego-lane detection has been extensively studied and has achieved impressive results in many scenarios. However, ego-lane detection in the missing feature scenarios is still an unsolved problem. To address this problem, previous methods have been devoted to proposing more complicated feature extraction algorithms, but they are very time-consuming and cannot deal with extreme scenarios. Different from others, this paper exploits prior knowledge contained in digital maps, which has a strong capability to enhance the performance of …
Dense Hybrid Proposal Modulation for Lane Detection
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Lane detection is an important component of many real-world autonomous systems. Despite a wide variety of lane detection approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time, lane detection remains a largely unsolved problem. This is because most of the existing lane detection methods either treat the lane detection as a dense prediction or a detection task, few of them consider the unique topologies (Y-shape, Fork-shape, nearly horizontal lane) of the lane markers, which leads to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we present a new method for lane detection based …
One of the biggest reasons for road accidents is curvy lanes and blind turns. Even one of the biggest hurdles for new autonomous vehicles is to detect curvy lanes, multiple lanes and lanes with a lot of discontinuity and noise. This paper presents very efficient and advanced algorithm for detecting curves having desired slopes (especially for detecting curvy lanes in real time) and detection of curves (lanes) with a lot of noise, discontinuity and disturbances. Overall aim is to develop robust method for this task which is applicable even in adverse conditions. Even in some of most famous and …
Lane detection is a fundamental task in autonomous driving, and has achieved great progress as deep learning emerges. Previous anchor-based methods often design dense anchors, which highly depend on the training dataset and remain fixed during inference. We analyze that dense anchors are not necessary for lane detection, and propose a transformer-based lane detection framework based on a sparse anchor mechanism. To this end, we generate sparse anchors with position-aware lane queries and angle queries instead of traditional explicit anchors. We adopt Horizontal Perceptual Attention (HPA) to ag…
LaneTCA: Enhancing Video Lane Detection with Temporal Context Aggregation
National Engineering Laboratory for Brain-Inspired Intelligence Technology and Application（类脑智能技术与应用国家工程实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Duke University（杜克大学）；Horizon Robotics, Inc.（地平线机器人公司）
Lane detection is to detect lanes on the road and provide the accurate location and shape of each lane. It severs as one of the key techniques to enable modern assisted and autonomous driving systems. However, several unique properties of lanes challenge the detection methods. The lack of distinctive features makes lane detection algorithms tend to be confused by other objects with similar local appearance. Moreover, the inconsistent number of lanes on a road as well as diverse lane line patterns, e.g. solid, broken, single, double, merging, and splitting lines further hamper the performance. …
A number of lane detection methods depend on a proposal-free instance segmentation because of its adaptability to flexible object shape, occlusion, and real-time application. This paper addresses the problem that pixel embedding in proposal-free instance segmentation based lane detection is difficult to optimize. A translation invariance of convolution, which is one of the supposed strengths, causes challenges in optimizing pixel embedding. In this work, we propose a lane detection method based on proposal-free instance segmentation, directly optimizing spatial embedding of pixels using image …
Modern deep-learning-based lane detection methods are successful in most scenarios but struggling for lane lines with complex topologies. In this work, we propose CondLaneNet, a novel top-to-down lane detection framework that detects the lane instances first and then dynamically predicts the line shape for each instance. Aiming to resolve lane instance-level discrimination problem, we introduce a conditional lane detection strategy based on conditional convolution and row-wise formulation. Further, we design the Recurrent Instance Module(RIM) to overcome the problem of detecting lane lines wit…
Recently, lane detection has made great progress with the rapid development of deep neural networks and autonomous driving. However, there exist three mainly problems including characterizing lanes, modeling the structural relationship between scenes and lanes, and supporting more attributes (e.g., instance and type) of lanes. In this paper, we propose a novel structure guided framework to solve these problems simultaneously. In the framework, we first introduce a new lane representation to characterize each instance. Then a topdown vanishing point guided anchoring mechanism is proposed to pro…
Lane detection is one of the most important tasks in self-driving. Due to various complex scenarios (e.g., severe occlusion, ambiguous lanes, etc.) and the sparse supervisory signals inherent in lane annotations, lane detection task is still challenging. Thus, it is difficult for the ordinary convolutional neural network (CNN) to train in general scenes to catch subtle lane feature from the raw image. In this paper, we present a novel module named REcurrent Feature-Shift Aggregator (RESA) to enrich lane feature after preliminary feature extraction with an ordinary CNN. RESA takes advantage of …
In autonomous driving, detecting reliable and accurate lane marker positions is a crucial yet challenging task. The conventional approaches for the lane marker detection problem perform a pixel-level dense prediction task followed by sophisticated post-processing that is inevitable since lane markers are typically represented by a collection of line segments without thickness. In this paper, we propose a method performing direct lane marker vertex prediction in an end-to-end manner, i.e., without any post-processing step that is required in the pixel-level dense prediction task. Specifically, …
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
We focus on bridging domain discrepancy in lane detection among different scenarios to greatly reduce extra annotation and re-training costs for autonomous driving. Critical factors hinder the performance improvement of cross-domain lane detection that conventional methods only focus on pixel-wise loss while ignoring shape and position priors of lanes. To address the issue, we propose the Multi-level Domain Adaptation (MLDA) framework, a new perspective to handle cross-domain lane detection at three complementary semantic levels of pixel, instance and category. Specifically, at pixel level, we…
Mainstream lane marker detection methods are implemented by predicting the overall structure and deriving parametric curves through post-processing. Complex lane line shapes require high-dimensional output of CNNs to model global structures, which further increases the demand for model capacity and training data. In contrast, the locality of a lane marker has finite geometric variations and spatial coverage. We propose a novel lane marker detection solution, FOLOLane, that focuses on modeling local patterns and achieving prediction of global structures in a bottom-up manner. Specifically, the …
A novel, real-time, mm-Wave radar-based static hand shape classification algorithm and implementation are proposed. The method finds several applications in low cost and privacy sensitive touchless control technology using 60 Ghz radar as the sensor input. As opposed to prior Range-Doppler image based 2D classification solutions, our method converts raw radar data to 3D sparse cartesian point clouds.The demonstrated 3D radar neural network model using deformable transformers significantly surpasses the performance results set by prior methods which either utilize custom signal processing or ap…
University of Twente（特文特大学）；VU University Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）
Studying the behavior of crowds is vital for understanding and predicting human interactions in public areas. Research has shown that, under certain conditions, large groups of people can form collective behavior patterns: local interactions between individuals results in global movements patterns. To detect these patterns in a crowd, we assume each person is carrying an on-body device that acts a local proximity sensor, e.g., smartphone or bluetooth badge, and represent the texture of the crowd as a proximity graph. Our goal is extract information about crowds from these proximity graphs. In …
