Towards End-to-End Lane Detection: an Instance Segmentation Approach

Modern cars are incorporating an increasing number of driver assist features, among which automatic lane keeping. The latter allows the car to properly position itself within the road lanes, which is also crucial for any subsequent lane departure or trajectory planning decision in fully autonomous cars. Traditional lane detection methods rely on a combination of highly-specialized, hand-crafted features and heuristics, usually followed by post-processing techniques, that are computationally expensive and prone to scalability due to road scene variations. More recent approaches leverage deep learning models, trained for pixel-wise lane segmentation, even when no markings are present in the image due to their big receptive field. Despite their advantages, these methods are limited to detecting a pre-defined, fixed number of lanes, e.g. ego-lanes, and can not cope with lane changes. In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned limitations and propose to cast the lane detection problem as an instance segmentation problem - in which each lane forms its own instance - that can be trained end-to-end. To parametrize the segmented lane instances before fitting the lane, we further propose to apply a learned perspective transformation, conditioned on the image, in contrast to a fixed "bird's-eye view" transformation. By doing so, we ensure a lane fitting which is robust against road plane changes, unlike existing approaches that rely on a fixed, pre-defined transformation. In summary, we propose a fast lane detection algorithm, running at 50 fps, which can handle a variable number of lanes and cope with lane changes. We verify our method on the tuSimple dataset and achieve competitive results

Lane Line Detection and Object Scene Segmentation Using Otsu Thresholding and the Fast Hough Transform for Intelligent Vehicles in Complex Road Conditions

An Otsu-threshold- and Canny-edge-detection-based fast Hough transform (FHT) approach to lane detection was proposed to improve the accuracy of lane detection for autonomous vehicle driving. During the last two decades, autonomous vehicles have become very popular, and it is constructive to avoid traffic accidents due to human mistakes. The new generation needs automatic vehicle intelligence. One of the essential functions of a cutting-edge automobile system is lane detection. This study recommended the idea of lane detection through improved (extended) Canny edge detection using a fast Hough transform. The Gaussian blur filter was used to smooth out the image and reduce noise, which could help to improve the edge detection accuracy. An edge detection operator known as the Sobel operator calculated the gradient of the image intensity to identify edges in an image using a convolutional kernel. These techniques were applied in the initial lane detection module to enhance the characteristics of the road lanes, making it easier to detect them in the image. The Hough transform was then used to identify the routes based on the mathematical relationship between the lanes and the vehicle. It did this by converting the image into a polar coordinate system and looking for lines within a specific range of contrasting points. This allowed the algorithm to distinguish between the lanes and other features in the image. After this, the Hough transform was used for lane detection, making it possible to distinguish between left and right lane marking detection extraction; the region of interest (ROI) must be extracted for traditional approaches to work effectively and easily. The proposed methodology was tested on several image sequences. The least-squares fitting in this region was then used to track the lane. The proposed system demonstrated high lane detection in experiments, demonstrating that the identification method performed well regarding reasoning speed and identification accuracy, which considered both accuracy and real-time processing and could satisfy the requirements of lane recognition for lightweight automatic driving systems

DeepCrashTest: Translating Dashcam Videos to Virtual Tests forAutomated Driving Systems

abstract: The autonomous vehicle technology has come a long way, but currently, there are no companies that are able to offer fully autonomous ride in any conditions, on any road without any human supervision. These systems should be extensively trained and validated to guarantee safe human transportation. Any small errors in the system functionality may lead to fatal accidents and may endanger human lives. Deep learning methods are widely used for environment perception and prediction of hazardous situations. These techniques require huge amount of training data with both normal and abnormal samples to enable the vehicle to avoid a dangerous situation. The goal of this thesis is to generate simulations from real-world tricky collision scenarios for training and testing autonomous vehicles. Dashcam crash videos from the internet can now be utilized to extract valuable collision data and recreate the crash scenarios in a simulator. The problem of extracting 3D vehicle trajectories from videos recorded by an unknown monocular camera source is solved using a modular approach. The framework is divided into two stages: (a) extracting meaningful adversarial trajectories from short crash videos, and (b) developing methods to automatically process and simulate the vehicle trajectories on a vehicle simulator.Dissertation/ThesisVideo DemonstrationMasters Thesis Computer Science 201