Safety2Drive: Safety-Critical Scenario Benchmark for the Evaluation of Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems demand the high levels of safety assurance. Despite significant advancements in AD demonstrated on open-source benchmarks like Longest6 and Bench2Drive, existing datasets still lack regulatory-compliant scenario libraries for closed-loop testing to comprehensively evaluate the functional safety of AD. Meanwhile, real-world AD accidents are underrepresented in current driving datasets. This scarcity leads to inadequate evaluation of AD performance, posing risks to safety validation and practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose Safety2Drive, a safety-critical scenario library designed to evaluate AD systems. Safety2Drive offers three key contributions. (1) Safety2Drive comprehensively covers the test items required by standard regulations and contains 70 AD function test items. (2) Safety2Drive supports the safety-critical scenario generalization. It has the ability to inject safety threats such as natural environment corruptions and adversarial attacks cross camera and LiDAR sensors. (3) Safety2Drive supports multi-dimensional evaluation. In addition to the evaluation of AD systems, it also supports the evaluation of various perception tasks, such as object detection and lane detection. Safety2Drive provides a paradigm from scenario construction to validation, establishing a standardized test framework for the safe deployment of AD.

DB3D-L: Depth-aware BEV Feature Transformation for Accurate 3D Lane Detection

3D Lane detection plays an important role in autonomous driving. Recent advances primarily build Birds-Eye-View (BEV) feature from front-view (FV) images to perceive 3D information of Lane more effectively. However, constructing accurate BEV information from FV image is limited due to the lacking of depth information, causing previous works often rely heavily on the assumption of a flat ground plane. Leveraging monocular depth estimation to assist in constructing BEV features is less constrained, but existing methods struggle to effectively integrate the two tasks. To address the above issue, in this paper, an accurate 3D lane detection method based on depth-aware BEV feature transtormation is proposed. In detail, an effective feature extraction module is designed, in which a Depth Net is integrated to obtain the vital depth information for 3D perception, thereby simplifying the complexity of view transformation. Subquently a feature reduce module is proposed to reduce height dimension of FV features and depth features, thereby enables effective fusion of crucial FV features and depth features. Then a fusion module is designed to build BEV feature from prime FV feature and depth information. The proposed method performs comparably with state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic Apollo, realistic OpenLane datasets.

Decoding Neighborhood Environments with Large Language Models

Neighborhood environments include physical and environmental conditions such as housing quality, roads, and sidewalks, which significantly influence human health and well-being. Traditional methods for assessing these environments, including field surveys and geographic information systems (GIS), are resource-intensive and challenging to evaluate neighborhood environments at scale. Although machine learning offers potential for automated analysis, the laborious process of labeling training data and the lack of accessible models hinder scalability. This study explores the feasibility of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini as tools for decoding neighborhood environments (e.g., sidewalk and powerline) at scale. We train a robust YOLOv11-based model, which achieves an average accuracy of 99.13% in detecting six environmental indicators, including streetlight, sidewalk, powerline, apartment, single-lane road, and multilane road. We then evaluate four LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations in identifying these indicators, with a focus on the impact of prompting strategies and fine-tuning. We apply majority voting with the top three LLMs to achieve over 88% accuracy, which demonstrates LLMs could be a useful tool to decode the neighborhood environment without any training effort.

Driving with Context: Online Map Matching for Complex Roads Using Lane Markings and Scenario Recognition

Accurate online map matching is fundamental to vehicle navigation and the activation of intelligent driving functions. Current online map matching methods are prone to errors in complex road networks, especially in multilevel road area. To address this challenge, we propose an online Standard Definition (SD) map matching method by constructing a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with multiple probability factors. Our proposed method can achieve accurate map matching even in complex road networks by carefully leveraging lane markings and scenario recognition in the designing of the probability factors. First, the lane markings are generated by a multi-lane tracking method and associated with the SD map using HMM to build an enriched SD map. In areas covered by the enriched SD map, the vehicle can re-localize itself by performing Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration for the lane markings. Then, the probability factor accounting for the lane marking detection can be obtained using the association probability between adjacent lanes and roads. Second, the driving scenario recognition model is applied to generate the emission probability factor of scenario recognition, which improves the performance of map matching on elevated roads and ordinary urban roads underneath them. We validate our method through extensive road tests in Europe and China, and the experimental results show that our proposed method effectively improves the online map matching accuracy as compared to other existing methods, especially in multilevel road area. Specifically, the experiments show that our proposed method achieves $F_1$ scores of 98.04% and 94.60% on the Zenseact Open Dataset and test data of multilevel road areas in Shanghai respectively, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. The implementation is available at https://github.com/TRV-Lab/LMSR-OMM.

Lane-Wise Highway Anomaly Detection

This paper proposes a scalable and interpretable framework for lane-wise highway traffic anomaly detection, leveraging multi-modal time series data extracted from surveillance cameras. Unlike traditional sensor-dependent methods, our approach uses AI-powered vision models to extract lane-specific features, including vehicle count, occupancy, and truck percentage, without relying on costly hardware or complex road modeling. We introduce a novel dataset containing 73,139 lane-wise samples, annotated with four classes of expert-validated anomalies: three traffic-related anomalies (lane blockage and recovery, foreign object intrusion, and sustained congestion) and one sensor-related anomaly (camera angle shift). Our multi-branch detection system integrates deep learning, rule-based logic, and machine learning to improve robustness and precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in precision, recall, and F1-score, providing a cost-effective and scalable solution for real-world intelligent transportation systems.

Geometry-aware Temporal Aggregation Network for Monocular 3D Lane Detection

Monocular 3D lane detection aims to estimate 3D position of lanes from frontal-view (FV) images. However, current monocular 3D lane detection methods suffer from two limitations, including inaccurate geometric information of the predicted 3D lanes and difficulties in maintaining lane integrity. To address these issues, we seek to fully exploit the potential of multiple input frames. First, we aim at enhancing the ability to perceive the geometry of scenes by leveraging temporal geometric consistency. Second, we strive to improve the integrity of lanes by revealing more instance information from temporal sequences. Therefore, we propose a novel Geometry-aware Temporal Aggregation Network (GTA-Net) for monocular 3D lane detection. On one hand, we develop the Temporal Geometry Enhancement Module (TGEM), which exploits geometric consistency across successive frames, facilitating effective geometry perception. On the other hand, we present the Temporal Instance-aware Query Generation (TIQG), which strategically incorporates temporal cues into query generation, thereby enabling the exploration of comprehensive instance information. Experiments demonstrate that our GTA-Net achieves SoTA results, surpassing existing monocular 3D lane detection solutions.

DriveNetBench: An Affordable and Configurable Single-Camera Benchmarking System for Autonomous Driving Networks

Validating autonomous driving neural networks often demands expensive equipment and complex setups, limiting accessibility for researchers and educators. We introduce DriveNetBench, an affordable and configurable benchmarking system designed to evaluate autonomous driving networks using a single-camera setup. Leveraging low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, and a flexible software stack, DriveNetBench enables easy integration of various driving models, such as object detection and lane following, while ensuring standardized evaluation in real-world scenarios. Our system replicates common driving conditions and provides consistent, repeatable metrics for comparing network performance. Through preliminary experiments with representative vision models, we illustrate how DriveNetBench effectively measures inference speed and accuracy within a controlled test environment. The key contributions of this work include its affordability, its replicability through open-source software, and its seamless integration into existing workflows, making autonomous vehicle research more accessible.

Depth3DLane: Monocular 3D Lane Detection via Depth Prior Distillation

Monocular 3D lane detection is challenging due to the difficulty in capturing depth information from single-camera images. A common strategy involves transforming front-view (FV) images into bird's-eye-view (BEV) space through inverse perspective mapping (IPM), facilitating lane detection using BEV features. However, IPM's flat-ground assumption and loss of contextual information lead to inaccuracies in reconstructing 3D information, especially height. In this paper, we introduce a BEV-based framework to address these limitations and improve 3D lane detection accuracy. Our approach incorporates a Hierarchical Depth-Aware Head that provides multi-scale depth features, mitigating the flat-ground assumption by enhancing spatial awareness across varying depths. Additionally, we leverage Depth Prior Distillation to transfer semantic depth knowledge from a teacher model, capturing richer structural and contextual information for complex lane structures. To further refine lane continuity and ensure smooth lane reconstruction, we introduce a Conditional Random Field module that enforces spatial coherence in lane predictions. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of z-axis error and outperforms other methods in the field in overall performance. The code is released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Depth3DLane-DCDD.

Datasets for Lane Detection in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review

Accurate lane detection is essential for automated driving, enabling safe and reliable vehicle navigation in a variety of road scenarios. Numerous datasets have been introduced to support the development and evaluation of lane detection algorithms, each differing in terms of the amount of data, sensor types, annotation granularity, environmental conditions, and scenario diversity. This paper provides a comprehensive review of over 30 publicly available lane detection datasets, systematically analysing their characteristics, advantages and limitations. We classify these datasets based on key factors such as sensor resolution, annotation types and diversity of road and weather conditions. By identifying existing challenges and research gaps, we highlight opportunities for future dataset improvements that can further drive innovation in robust lane detection. This survey serves as a resource for researchers seeking appropriate datasets for lane detection, and contributes to the broader goal of advancing autonomous driving.

A Robust Real-Time Lane Detection Method with Fog-Enhanced Feature Fusion for Foggy Conditions

Lane detection is a critical component of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Existing lane detection algorithms generally perform well under favorable weather conditions. However, their performance degrades significantly in adverse conditions, such as fog, which increases the risk of traffic accidents. This challenge is compounded by the lack of specialized datasets and methods designed for foggy environments. To address this, we introduce the FoggyLane dataset, captured in real-world foggy scenarios, and synthesize two additional datasets, FoggyCULane and FoggyTusimple, from existing popular lane detection datasets. Furthermore, we propose a robust Fog-Enhanced Network for lane detection, incorporating a Global Feature Fusion Module (GFFM) to capture global relationships in foggy images, a Kernel Feature Fusion Module (KFFM) to model the structural and positional relationships of lane instances, and a Low-level Edge Enhanced Module (LEEM) to address missing edge details in foggy conditions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with F1-scores of 95.04 on FoggyLane, 79.85 on FoggyCULane, and 96.95 on FoggyTusimple. Additionally, with TensorRT acceleration, the method reaches a processing speed of 38.4 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, confirming its real-time capabilities and robustness in foggy environments.