RONELDv2: A faster, improved lane tracking method

Lane detection is an integral part of control systems in autonomous vehicles and lane departure warning systems as lanes are a key component of the operating environment for road vehicles. In a previous paper, a robust neural network output enhancement for active lane detection (RONELD) method augmenting deep learning lane detection models to improve active, or ego, lane accuracy performance was presented. This paper extends the work by further investigating the lane tracking methods used to increase robustness of the method to lane changes and different lane dimensions (e.g. lane marking thickness) and proposes an improved, lighter weight lane detection method, RONELDv2. It improves on the previous RONELD method by detecting the lane point variance, merging lanes to find a more accurate set of lane parameters, and using an exponential moving average method to calculate more robust lane weights. Experiments using the proposed improvements show a consistent increase in lane detection accuracy results across different datasets and deep learning models, as well as a decrease in computational complexity observed via an up to two-fold decrease in runtime, which enhances its suitability for real-time use on autonomous vehicles and lane departure warning systems.

RONELD: Robust Neural Network Output Enhancement for Active Lane Detection

Accurate lane detection is critical for navigation in autonomous vehicles, particularly the active lane which demarcates the single road space that the vehicle is currently traveling on. Recent state-of-the-art lane detection algorithms utilize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to train deep learning models on popular benchmarks such as TuSimple and CULane. While each of these models works particularly well on train and test inputs obtained from the same dataset, the performance drops significantly on unseen datasets of different environments. In this paper, we present a real-time robust neural network output enhancement for active lane detection (RONELD) method to identify, track, and optimize active lanes from deep learning probability map outputs. We first adaptively extract lane points from the probability map outputs, followed by detecting curved and straight lanes before using weighted least squares linear regression on straight lanes to fix broken lane edges resulting from fragmentation of edge maps in real images. Lastly, we hypothesize true active lanes through tracking preceding frames. Experimental results demonstrate an up to two-fold increase in accuracy using RONELD on cross-dataset validation tests.