GeoReFormer: Geometry-Aware Refinement for Lane Segment Detection and Topology Reasoning

Accurate 3D lane segment detection and topology reasoning are critical for structured online map construction in autonomous driving. Recent transformer-based approaches formulate this task as query-based set prediction, yet largely inherit decoder designs originally developed for compact object detection. However, lane segments are continuous polylines embedded in directed graphs, and generic query initialization and unconstrained refinement do not explicitly encode this geometric and relational structure. We propose GeoReFormer (Geometry-aware Refinement Transformer), a unified query-based architecture that embeds geometry- and topology-aware inductive biases directly within the transformer decoder. GeoReFormer introduces data-driven geometric priors for structured query initialization, bounded coordinate-space refinement for stable polyline deformation, and per-query gated topology propagation to selectively integrate relational context. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, GeoReFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance with 34.5% mAP while improving topology consistency over strong transformer baselines, demonstrating the utility of explicit geometric and relational structure encoding.

PoseDriver: A Unified Approach to Multi-Category Skeleton Detection for Autonomous Driving

Object skeletons offer a concise representation of structural information, capturing essential aspects of posture and orientation that are crucial for autonomous driving applications. However, a unified architecture that simultaneously handles multiple instances and categories using only the input image remains elusive. In this paper, we introduce PoseDriver, a unified framework for bottom-up multi-category skeleton detection tailored to common objects in driving scenarios. We model each category as a distinct task to systematically address the challenges of multi-task learning. Specifically, we propose a novel approach for lane detection based on skeleton representations, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the OpenLane dataset. Moreover, we present a new dataset for bicycle skeleton detection and assess the transferability of our framework to novel categories. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MonoSIM: An open source SIL framework for Ackermann Vehicular Systems with Monocular Vision

This paper presents an open-source Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation platform designed for autonomous Ackerman vehicle research and education. The proposed framework focuses on simplicity, while making it easy to work with small-scale experimental setups, such as the XTENTH-CAR platform. The system was designed using open source tools, creating an environment with a monocular camera vision system to capture stimuli from it with minimal computational overhead through a sliding window based lane detection method. The platform supports a flexible algorithm testing and validation environment, allowing researchers to implement and compare various control strategies within an easy-to-use virtual environment. To validate the working of the platform, Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithms were implemented within the SIL framework. The results confirm that the platform provides a reliable environment for algorithm verification, making it an ideal tool for future multi-agent system research, educational purposes, and low-cost AGV development. Our code is available at https://github.com/shantanu404/monosim.git.

ReManNet: A Riemannian Manifold Network for Monocular 3D Lane Detection

Monocular 3D lane detection remains challenging due to depth ambiguity and weak geometric constraints. Mainstream methods rely on depth guidance, BEV projection, and anchor- or curve-based heads with simplified physical assumptions, remapping high-dimensional image features while only weakly encoding road geometry. Lacking an invariant geometric-topological coupling between lanes and the underlying road surface, 2D-to-3D lifting is ill-posed and brittle, often degenerating into concavities, bulges, and twists. To address this, we propose the Road-Manifold Assumption: the road is a smooth 2D manifold in $\mathbb{R}^3$, lanes are embedded 1D submanifolds, and sampled lane points are dense observations, thereby coupling metric and topology across surfaces, curves, and point sets. Building on this, we propose ReManNet, which first produces initial lane predictions with an image backbone and detection heads, then encodes geometry as Riemannian Gaussian descriptors on the symmetric positive-definite (SPD) manifold, and fuses these descriptors with visual features through a lightweight gate to maintain coherent 3D reasoning. We also propose the 3D Tunnel Lane IoU (3D-TLIoU) loss, a joint point-curve objective that computes slice-wise overlap of tubular neighborhoods along each lane to improve shape-level alignment. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ReManNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) or competitive results. On OpenLane, it improves F1 by +8.2% over the baseline and by +1.8% over the previous best, with scenario-level gains of up to +6.6%. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/changehome717/ReManNet.

Typography-Based Monocular Distance Estimation Framework for Vehicle Safety Systems

Accurate inter-vehicle distance estimation is a cornerstone of advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. While LiDAR and radar provide high precision, their cost prohibits widespread adoption in mass-market vehicles. Monocular vision offers a low-cost alternative but suffers from scale ambiguity and sensitivity to environmental disturbances. This paper introduces a typography-based monocular distance estimation framework, which exploits the standardized typography of license plates as passive fiducial markers for metric distance estimation. The core geometric module uses robust plate detection and character segmentation to measure character height and computes distance via the pinhole camera model. The system incorporates interactive calibration, adaptive detection with strict and permissive modes, and multi-method character segmentation leveraging both adaptive and global thresholding. To enhance robustness, the framework further includes camera pose compensation using lane-based horizon estimation, hybrid deep-learning fusion, temporal Kalman filtering for velocity estimation, and multi-feature fusion that exploits additional typographic cues such as stroke width, character spacing, and plate border thickness. Experimental validation with a calibrated monocular camera in a controlled indoor setup achieved a coefficient of variation of 2.3% in character height across consecutive frames and a mean absolute error of 7.7%. The framework operates without GPU acceleration, demonstrating real-time feasibility. A comprehensive comparison with a plate-width based method shows that character-based ranging reduces the standard deviation of estimates by 35%, translating to smoother, more consistent distance readings in practice, where erratic estimates could trigger unnecessary braking or acceleration.

TorR: Towards Brain-Inspired Task-Oriented Reasoning via Cache-Oriented Algorithm-Architecture Co-design

Task-oriented object detection (TOOD) atop CLIP offers open-vocabulary, prompt-driven semantics, yet dense per-window computation and heavy memory traffic hinder real-time, power-limited edge deployment. We present \emph{TorR}, a brain-inspired \textbf{algorithm--architecture co-design} that \textbf{replaces CLIP-style dense alignment with a hyperdimensional (HDC) associative reasoner} and turns temporal coherence into reuse. On the \emph{algorithm} side, TorR reformulates alignment as HDC similarity and graph composition, introducing \emph{partial-similarity reuse} via (i) query caching with per-class score accumulation, (ii) exact $δ$-updates when only a small set of hypervector bits change, and (iii) similarity/load-gated bypass under high system load. On the \emph{architecture} side, TorR instantiates a lane-scalable, bit-sliced item memory with bank/precision gating and a lightweight controller that schedules bypass/$δ$/full paths to meet RT-30/RT-60 targets as object counts vary. Synthesized in a TSMC 28\,nm process and exercised with a cycle-accurate simulator, TorR sustains real-time throughput with millijoule-scale energy per window ($\approx$50\,mJ at 60\,FPS; $\approx$113\,mJ at 30\,FPS) and low latency jitter, while delivering competitive AP@0.5 across five task prompts (mean 44.27\%) within a bounded margin to strong VLM baselines, but at orders-of-magnitude lower energy. The design exposes deployment-time configurability (effective dimension $D'$, thresholds, precision) to trade accuracy, latency, and energy for edge budgets.

Multi-model approach for autonomous driving: A comprehensive study on traffic sign-, vehicle- and lane detection and behavioral cloning

Deep learning and computer vision techniques have become increasingly important in the development of self-driving cars. These techniques play a crucial role in enabling self-driving cars to perceive and understand their surroundings, allowing them to safely navigate and make decisions in real-time. Using Neural Networks self-driving cars can accurately identify and classify objects such as pedestrians, other vehicles, and traffic signals. Using deep learning and analyzing data from sensors such as cameras and radar, self-driving cars can predict the likely movement of other objects and plan their own actions accordingly. In this study, a novel approach to enhance the performance of selfdriving cars by using pre-trained and custom-made neural networks for key tasks, including traffic sign classification, vehicle detection, lane detection, and behavioral cloning is provided. The methodology integrates several innovative techniques, such as geometric and color transformations for data augmentation, image normalization, and transfer learning for feature extraction. These techniques are applied to diverse datasets,including the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), road and lane segmentation datasets, vehicle detection datasets, and data collected using the Udacity selfdriving car simulator to evaluate the model efficacy. The primary objective of the work is to review the state-of-the-art in deep learning and computer vision for self-driving cars. The findings of the work are effective in solving various challenges related to self-driving cars like traffic sign classification, lane prediction, vehicle detection, and behavioral cloning, and provide valuable insights into improving the robustness and reliability of autonomous systems, paving the way for future research and deployment of safer and more efficient self-driving technologies.

HG-Lane: High-Fidelity Generation of Lane Scenes under Adverse Weather and Lighting Conditions without Re-annotation

Lane detection is a crucial task in autonomous driving, as it helps ensure the safe operation of vehicles. However, existing datasets such as CULane and TuSimple contain relatively limited data under extreme weather conditions, including rain, snow, and fog. As a result, detection models trained on these datasets often become unreliable in such environments, which may lead to serious safety-critical failures on the road. To address this issue, we propose HG-Lane, a High-fidelity Generation framework for Lane Scenes under adverse weather and lighting conditions without requiring re-annotation. Based on this framework, we further construct a benchmark that includes adverse weather and lighting scenarios, containing 30,000 images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly improves the performance of existing lane detection networks. For example, using the state-of-the-art CLRNet, the overall mF1 score on our benchmark increases by 20.87 percent. The F1@50 score for the overall, normal, snow, rain, fog, night, and dusk categories increases by 19.75 percent, 8.63 percent, 38.8 percent, 14.96 percent, 26.84 percent, 21.5 percent, and 12.04 percent, respectively. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/zdc233/HG-Lane.

Radar-based Pose Optimization for HD Map Generation from Noisy Multi-Drive Vehicle Fleet Data

High-definition (HD) maps are important for autonomous driving, but their manual generation and maintenance is very expensive. This motivates the usage of an automated map generation pipeline. Fleet vehicles provide sufficient sensors for map generation, but their measurements are less precise, introducing noise into the mapping pipeline. This work focuses on mitigating the localization noise component through aligning radar measurements in terms of raw radar point clouds of vehicle poses of different drives and performing pose graph optimization to produce a globally optimized solution between all drives present in the dataset. Improved poses are first used to generate a global radar occupancy map, aimed to facilitate precise on-vehicle localization. Through qualitative analysis we show contrast-rich feature clarity, focusing on omnipresent guardrail posts as the main feature type observable in the map. Second, the improved poses can be used as a basis for an existing lane boundary map generation pipeline, majorly improving map output compared to its original pure line detection based optimization approach.

Vehicle behaviour estimation for abnormal event detection using distributed fiber optic sensing

The distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) system is a cost-effective wide-area traffic monitoring technology that utilizes existing fiber infrastructure to effectively detect traffic congestions. However, detecting single-lane abnormalities, that lead to congestions, is still a challenge. These single-lane abnormalities can be detected by monitoring lane change behaviour of vehicles, performed to avoid congestion along the monitoring section of a road. This paper presents a method to detect single-lane abnormalities by tracking individual vehicle paths and detecting vehicle lane changes along a section of a road. We propose a method to estimate the vehicle position at all time instances and fit a path using clustering techniques. We detect vehicle lane change by monitoring any change in spectral centroid of vehicle vibrations by tracking a reference vehicle along a highway. The evaluation of our proposed method with real traffic data showed 80% accuracy for lane change detection events that represent presence of abnormalities.