Lane detection in dense fog using a polarimetric dehazing method.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Lane detection plays a critical role in autonomous vehicles for safe and reliable navigation. Lane detection is traditionally accomplished using a camera sensor and computer vision processing. The downside of this traditional technique is that it can be computationally intensive when high quality images at a fast frame rate are used and has reliability issues from occlusion such as, glare, shadows, active road construction, and more. This study addresses these issues by exploring alternative methods for lane detection in specific scenarios caused from road construction-induced lane shift and sun glare. Specifically, a U-Net, a convolutional network used for image segmentation, camera-based lane detection method is compared with a radar-based approach using a new type of sensor previously unused in the autonomous vehicle space: radar retro-reflectors. This evaluation is performed using ground truth data, obtained by measuring the lane positions and transforming them into pixel coordinates. The performance of each method is assessed using the statistical <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> score, indicating the correlation between the detected lane lines and the ground truth. The results show that the U-Net camera-based method exhibits limitations in accurately detecting and aligning the lane lines, particularly in challenging scenarios. However, the radar-based lane detection method demonstrates a strong correlation with the ground truth which implies that the use of this sensor may improve current reliability issues from conventional camera lane detection approach. Furthermore, the study highlights the limitations of the U-Net model for camera lane detection, especially in scenarios with sun glare. This study shows that infrastructure-based radar retro-reflectors can improve autonomous vehicle lane detection reliability. The integration of different sensor modalities and the development of advanced computer vision algorithms are crucial for improving the accuracy, reliability, and energy efficiency of lane detection systems. Addressing these challenges contributes to the advancement of autonomous vehicles and the realization of safer and more efficient transportation systems.</div></div>

Lane detection plays a pivotal role in the successful implementation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs), which are essential for detecting the road’s lane markings and determining the vehicle’s position, thereby influencing subsequent decision making. However, current deep learning-based lane detection methods encounter challenges. Firstly, the on-board hardware limitations necessitate an exceptionally fast prediction speed for the lane detection method. Secondly, improvements are required for effective lane detection in complex scenarios. This paper addresses these issues by enhancing the row-anchor-based lane detection method. The Transformer encoder–decoder structure is leveraged as the row classification enhances the model’s capability to extract global features and detect lane lines in intricate environments. The Feature-aligned Pyramid Network (FaPN) structure serves as an auxiliary branch, complemented by a novel structural loss with expectation loss, further refining the method’s accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate our method’s commendable accuracy and real-time performance, achieving a rapid prediction speed of 129 FPS (the single prediction time of the model on RTX3080 is 15.72 ms) and a 96.16% accuracy on the Tusimple dataset—a 3.32% improvement compared to the baseline method.

Dealing with complex and variable road scenes is a challenge for autonomous driving, so lane detection with good performance is crucial. Currently, mainstream lane detection methods are divided into semantic segmentation-based and instance segmentation-based methods. The former is limited to detect a pre-defined, fixed number of lanes and unable to cope with lane changes, while the latter requires post-clustering processing despite a variable number of lanes detected. In this paper, we propose a novel instance segmentation-based method using lane locations to get an arbitrary number of lane instances directly. In addition, in order to improve the speed of lane detection, we employee key points to represent lanes instead of pixels to reduce the granularity of segmentation. In conclusion, we propose a real-time lane detection method which can predict an arbitrary number of lanes directly. We validate our method on two public datasets and the competitive results are obtained by comparing with existing methods.

Enhanced Cross Layer Refinement Network for robust lane detection across diverse lighting and road conditions

Lane detection and tracking technique is the autonomous driving basis for Rubber-Tired Gantries (RTGs), vital to the automation and intelligence updating of man-driven container terminals. However, the existing lane detection methods developed for common road scenarios cannot meet the high-precision and robust all-weather requirements of RTG autonomous driving. In this article, we propose an Adaptive Edge-based Lane Detection and Tracking method considering RTG lanes’ characteristics in this paper. First, the candidate edges of lane lines are detected and paired based on the enhanced gradient features. Next, inverse perspective mapping is employed to search the right edges, followed by an adaptive sliding-window method. Ultimately, we develop an adaptive Kalman filter to track lane lines robustly, detecting confidence weighting by relaxing the constraint of lane line width. The proposed method is tested in an actual container yard, the lane centerline’s average position error is 2.051 pixels, and the detection success rate is close to 100%.

Lane detection is the key technology of an advanced driver assistance system. This study proposed an efficient and novel lane detection method, Lane Kernel Parameter Module ResNet-18 (LKPM-ResNet-18), to improve the detection efficiency of lane with complex topologies (such as divergent lines and dense lines). This method can precisely predict the global structure in a bottom-up manner and directly output the curve parameters of the lane alignment model. In addition, LKPM was used to obtain accurately the local structure information and the slender shape of the lane with complex topology, and then the shape convolution kernel parameters of each instance are dynamically predicted to optimize the results of the subsequent output curves. Finally, the prior information of the global lane is fully integrated through the lane structure constraint loss, and the optimization results are fused into the global geometric curve fitting output, so that the fitted lanes are smoother and more continuous. The method proposed has real-time detection efficiency and requires little postprocessing because of the end-to-end direct approach. The validated results show that the efficiency of this method is obviously better than that of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods, such as PointLaneNet and ENet-SAD. The F1 scores increase by 0.43% and 4.92%, respectively compared with the latest CurveLanes-NAS-L and SCNN on the CULane test dataset. The accuracy of 88.98% can be obtained on the CurveLanes test dataset. Meanwhile, the result from real driving environment detection exceeds the top performances of the other by 2.22% with the accuracy of 86.47%.

As the high growth of the number of vehicles, the traffic accidents are becoming more and more serious in recent years. In order to avoid the drivers being in danger, an intelligent vision-based system should focus on the image contents of the front the camera setting under the rear-view mirror in the vehicle. In this paper, we present a functional-link-based neuro-fuzzy network (FLNFN) structure for lane detection and departure warning system application. The proposed FLNFN model uses a functional link neural network (FLNN) to the consequent part of the fuzzy rules. This study uses orthogonal polynomials and linearly independent functions in a functional expansion of the FLNN. Thus, the consequent part of the proposed FLNFN model is a nonlinear combination of input variables. An online learning algorithm, which consists of structure learning and parameter learning, is also presented. The structure learning depends on the entropy measure to determine the number of fuzzy rules. The parameter learning, based on the gradient descent method, can adjust the shape of the membership function and the corresponding weights of the FLNN. The lane detection method and the departure warning system proposed in this paper have been successfully evaluated on a PC platform of 3.2-GHz CPU, where the average frame-rate is up to 30fps.

Dynamically Enhanced lane detection with multi-scale semantic feature fusion

Lane detection plays a vital role in making the idea of the autonomous car a reality. Traditional lane detection methods need extensive hand-crafted features and post-processing techniques, which make the models specific feature-oriented, and susceptible to instability for the variations on road scenes. In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) models, especially Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have been proposed and utilized to perform pixel-level lane segmentation. However, most of the methods focus on achieving high accuracy while considering structured roads and good weather conditions and do not put emphasis on testing their models on defected roads, especially ones with blurry lane lines, no lane lines, and cracked pavements, which are predominant in the real world. Moreover, many of these CNN-based models have complex structures and require high-end systems to operate, which makes them quite unsuitable for being implemented in embedded devices. Considering these shortcomings, in this paper, we have introduced a novel CNN model named LLDNet based on an encoder–decoder architecture that is lightweight and has been tested in adverse weather as well as road conditions. A channel attention and spatial attention module are integrated into the designed architecture to refine the feature maps for achieving outstanding results with a lower number of parameters. We have used a hybrid dataset to train our model, which was created by combining two separate datasets, and have compared the model with a few state-of-the-art encoder–decoder architectures. Numerical results on the utilized dataset show that our model surpasses the compared methods in terms of dice coefficient, IoU, and the size of the models. Moreover, we carried out extensive experiments on the videos of different roads in Bangladesh. The visualization results exhibit that our model can detect the lanes accurately in both structured and defected roads and adverse weather conditions. Experimental results elicit that our designed method is capable of detecting lanes accurately and is ready for practical implementation.

Lane departure warning system plays an important role in driver assistance systems. The proposed algorithm assumes that lanes are always the straight lines and whole algorithm is based on Hough transform. Due to the complexity of urban traffic scenes, false lane detections are highly caused by warning lines and signs whose shapes and colors are similar to the lane boundary. In this study, we improve the accuracy of the lane detection base on Hough, a score function based on the width between left and right lanes is proposed to obtain reliable lane detect results on urban traffic scene. Meanwhile, a list of candidate lanes is constructed at the least of execution time. Experiments under various scenes showed that the proposed lane detection method can work robustly in the real-time.KeywordsLane detectionIntelligent vehicleMachine visiondriving assistance

In recent years, many companies are working on the development of autonomous cars. Every citizen on the planet is concerned about their safety. In the framework of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, one of the main goals is to improve safety and reduce road accidents, ultimately saving lives. One of the most difficult jobs in an autonomous driving system is detecting road lanes or road boundaries. Lane and object detection may be a crucial component of collision prevention in driving assistance systems. With the growth in traffic, there is a demand for more security and comfort when driving, it impose the development of new technology. Computer vision is one of the ways that may be utilized to assist the driver in difficult scenarios in order to improve his safety and comfort. The initial layer of autonomous vehicles' capabilities is lane tracking. Many sensors, including as lasers, radar, and vision sensors, are commonly employed for obstacle and lane detection. Computer vision is one of the primary method for detecting road limits and lanes using a vehicle's vision system. The technology uses a camera installed on the vehicle to capture the front view, then uses a few algorithms to detect lanes and objects. The lanes and objects are detected using a flexible algorithm. This paper focuses on a computer vision-based object detection technique by using CNN algorithm.

An advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS), based on lane detection technology, detects dangerous situations through various sensors and either warns the driver or takes over direct control of the vehicle. At present, cameras are commonly used for lane detection; however, their performance varies widely depending on the lighting conditions. Consequently, many studies have focused on using radar for lane detection. However, when using radar, it is difficult to distinguish between the plain road surface and painted lane markers, necessitating the use of radar reflectors for guidance. Previous studies have used long-range radars which may receive interference signals from various objects, including other vehicles, pedestrians, and buildings, thereby hampering lane detection. Therefore, we propose a lane detection method that uses an impulse radio ultra-wideband radar with high-range resolution and metal lane markers installed at regular intervals on the road. Lane detection and departure is realized upon using the periodically reflected signals as well as vehicle speed data as inputs. For verification, a field test was conducted by attaching radar to a vehicle and installing metal lane markers on the road. Experimental scenarios were established by varying the position and movement of the vehicle, and it was demonstrated that the proposed method enables lane detection based on the data measured.

Lane detection is part of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) equipped in intelligent vehicles. The system provides the driver with significant geometric information of the road ahead. Numerous deep learning techniques have been employed in lane detection because of the simplicity, ease, and efficiency of these techniques in learning discriminative features from RGB (red, green, and blue) images. However, existing works have rarely considered detecting lane markings during bad weather conditions, which could reduce lane detection performance. Hence, this paper proposed a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model with RGB and Canny edge detection used as the model’s spatial input. The proposed platform was developed using two scenarios: FCN-RGB-edge and FCN-edge. The model development was divided into three stages, namely data acquisition, platform development, and benchmarking against existing methods and data. Both scenarios using the proposed method yielded a 4% improvement compared to the original FCN-RGB images (i.e., the previous method). The Canny edge detection method successfully extracted necessary information from the images and neglected the water drops in rainy conditions by treating them as noise. In summary, the proposed method has the potential to boost the performance of the ADAS system in detecting lane markings in rainy conditions.

A robust and real-time lane detection method in low-light scenarios to advanced driver assistance systems

In driving assistance systems, lane detection can provide significant information for driving safety. In this paper, we proposed a novel real-time lane detection method to extract the location of lane marking lines based on inverse perspective mapping transform (top view) for the region of interest (ROI) of a video frame. The data were then filtered by a selective oriented Gaussian high pass filter, Hough transformation, and Kalman filter to give the initial regions to our optimized RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) Bezier splines fitting algorithm, which is the main innovation in this paper. Our experimental results and accuracy evaluation indicated that the proposed lane detection algorithm could run robustly in real time, and could achieve an average speed of 32.32 ms per frame for a 320 x 240 pixel image and 41.64 ms for a 640 x 480 pixel image, with a correct detection rate of over 92.85%. Moreover, our method was found to be suitable for various conditions.