Digital Twins (DT) have the potential to transform traffic management and operations by creating dynamic, virtual representations of transportation systems that sense conditions, analyze operations, and support decision-making. A key component for DT of the transportation system is dynamic roadway geometry sensing. However, existing approaches often rely on static maps or costly sensors, limiting scalability and adaptability. Additionally, large-scale DTs that collect and analyze data from multiple sources face challenges in privacy, communication, and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce Geo-ORBIT (Geometrical Operational Roadway Blueprint with Integrated Twin), a unified framework that combines real-time lane detection, DT synchronization, and federated meta-learning. At the core of Geo-ORBIT is GeoLane, a lightweight lane detection model that learns lane geometries from vehicle trajectory data using roadside cameras. We extend this model through Meta-GeoLane, which learns to personalize detection parameters for local entities, and FedMeta-GeoLane, a federated learning strategy that ensures scalable and privacy-preserving adaptation across roadside deployments. Our system is integrated with CARLA and SUMO to create a high-fidelity DT that renders highway scenarios and captures traffic flows in real-time. Extensive experiments across diverse urban scenes show that FedMeta-GeoLane consistently outperforms baseline and meta-learning approaches, achieving lower geometric error and stronger generalization to unseen locations while drastically reducing communication overhead. This work lays the foundation for flexible, context-aware infrastructure modeling in DTs. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/raynbowy23/FedMeta-GeoLane.git.
Collecting and annotating real-world data for safety-critical physical AI systems, such as Autonomous Vehicle (AV), is time-consuming and costly. It is especially challenging to capture rare edge cases, which play a critical role in training and testing of an AV system. To address this challenge, we introduce the Cosmos-Drive-Dreams - a synthetic data generation (SDG) pipeline that aims to generate challenging scenarios to facilitate downstream tasks such as perception and driving policy training. Powering this pipeline is Cosmos-Drive, a suite of models specialized from NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation model for the driving domain and are capable of controllable, high-fidelity, multi-view, and spatiotemporally consistent driving video generation. We showcase the utility of these models by applying Cosmos-Drive-Dreams to scale the quantity and diversity of driving datasets with high-fidelity and challenging scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our generated data helps in mitigating long-tail distribution problems and enhances generalization in downstream tasks such as 3D lane detection, 3D object detection and driving policy learning. We open source our pipeline toolkit, dataset and model weights through the NVIDIA's Cosmos platform. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/cosmos_drive_dreams
Topology reasoning, which unifies perception and structured reasoning, plays a vital role in understanding intersections for autonomous driving. However, its performance heavily relies on the accuracy of lane detection, particularly at connected lane endpoints. Existing methods often suffer from lane endpoints deviation, leading to incorrect topology construction. To address this issue, we propose TopoPoint, a novel framework that explicitly detects lane endpoints and jointly reasons over endpoints and lanes for robust topology reasoning. During training, we independently initialize point and lane query, and proposed Point-Lane Merge Self-Attention to enhance global context sharing through incorporating geometric distances between points and lanes as an attention mask . We further design Point-Lane Graph Convolutional Network to enable mutual feature aggregation between point and lane query. During inference, we introduce Point-Lane Geometry Matching algorithm that computes distances between detected points and lanes to refine lane endpoints, effectively mitigating endpoint deviation. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoPoint achieves state-of-the-art performance in topology reasoning (48.8 on OLS). Additionally, we propose DET$_p$ to evaluate endpoint detection, under which our method significantly outperforms existing approaches (52.6 v.s. 45.2 on DET$_p$). The code is released at https://github.com/Franpin/TopoPoint.
Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) is widely adopted in modern vehicles, yet its real-world performance remains underexplored due to proprietary systems and limited data access. This paper presents OpenLKA, the first open, large-scale dataset for LKA evaluation and improvement. It includes 400 hours of driving data from 50+ production vehicle models, collected through extensive road testing in Tampa, Florida and global contributions from the Comma.ai driving community. The dataset spans a wide range of challenging scenarios, including complex road geometries, degraded lane markings, adverse weather, lighting conditions and surrounding traffic. The dataset is multimodal, comprising: i) full CAN bus streams, decoded using custom reverse-engineered DBC files to extract key LKA events (e.g., system disengagements, lane detection failures); ii) synchronized high-resolution dash-cam video; iii) real-time outputs from Openpilot, providing accurate estimates of road curvature and lane positioning; iv) enhanced scene annotations generated by Vision Language Models, describing lane visibility, pavement quality, weather, lighting, and traffic conditions. By integrating vehicle-internal signals with high-fidelity perception and rich semantic context, OpenLKA provides a comprehensive platform for benchmarking the real-world performance of production LKA systems, identifying safety-critical operational scenarios, and assessing the readiness of current road infrastructure for autonomous driving. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/OpenLKA/OpenLKA.
In this paper, we focus on the challenging task of monocular 3D lane detection. Previous methods typically adopt inverse perspective mapping (IPM) to transform the Front-Viewed (FV) images or features into the Bird-Eye-Viewed (BEV) space for lane detection. However, IPM's dependence on flat ground assumption and context information loss in BEV representations lead to inaccurate 3D information estimation. Though efforts have been made to bypass BEV and directly predict 3D lanes from FV representations, their performances still fall behind BEV-based methods due to a lack of structured modeling of 3D lanes. In this paper, we propose a novel BEV-free method named Anchor3DLane++ which defines 3D lane anchors as structural representations and makes predictions directly from FV features. We also design a Prototype-based Adaptive Anchor Generation (PAAG) module to generate sample-adaptive sparse 3D anchors dynamically. In addition, an Equal-Width (EW) loss is developed to leverage the parallel property of lanes for regularization. Furthermore, camera-LiDAR fusion is also explored based on Anchor3DLane++ to leverage complementary information. Extensive experiments on three popular 3D lane detection benchmarks show that our Anchor3DLane++ outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/tusen-ai/Anchor3DLane.
Lane detection plays an important role in autonomous driving perception systems. As deep learning algorithms gain popularity, monocular lane detection methods based on them have demonstrated superior performance and emerged as a key research direction in autonomous driving perception. The core designs of these algorithmic frameworks can be summarized as follows: (1) Task paradigm, focusing on lane instance-level discrimination; (2) Lane modeling, representing lanes as a set of learnable parameters in the neural network; (3) Global context supplementation, enhancing inference on the obscure lanes; (4) Perspective effect elimination, providing accurate 3D lanes for downstream applications. From these perspectives, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of existing methods, encompassing both the increasingly mature 2D lane detection approaches and the developing 3D lane detection works. Besides, this paper compares the performance of mainstream methods on different benchmarks and investigates their inference speed under a unified setting for fair comparison. Moreover, we present some extended works on lane detection, including multi-task perception, video lane detection, online high-definition map construction, and lane topology reasoning, to offer readers a comprehensive roadmap for the evolution of lane detection. Finally, we point out some potential future research directions in this field. We exhaustively collect the papers and codes of existing works at https://github.com/Core9724/Awesome-Lane-Detection and will keep tracing the research.
Lane detection is a critical and challenging task in autonomous driving, particularly in real-world scenarios where traffic lanes can be slender, lengthy, and often obscured by other vehicles, complicating detection efforts. Existing anchor-based methods typically rely on prior lane anchors to extract features and subsequently refine the location and shape of lanes. While these methods achieve high performance, manually setting prior anchors is cumbersome, and ensuring sufficient coverage across diverse datasets often requires a large amount of dense anchors. Furthermore, the use of Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to eliminate redundant predictions complicates real-world deployment and may underperform in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose Polar R-CNN, an end-to-end anchor-based method for lane detection. By incorporating both local and global polar coordinate systems, Polar R-CNN facilitates flexible anchor proposals and significantly reduces the number of anchors required without compromising performance.Additionally, we introduce a triplet head with heuristic structure that supports NMS-free paradigm, enhancing deployment efficiency and performance in scenarios with dense lanes.Our method achieves competitive results on five popular lane detection benchmarks--Tusimple, CULane,LLAMAS, CurveLanes, and DL-Rai--while maintaining a lightweight design and straightforward structure. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ShqWW/PolarRCNN.
Reliable lane-following is essential for automated and assisted driving, yet existing solutions often rely on models that require extensive computational resources, limiting their deployment in compute-constrained vehicles. We evaluate five low-resource lane-following algorithms designed for real-time operation on vehicles with limited computing resources. Performance was assessed through simulation and deployment on real drive-by-wire electric vehicles, with evaluation metrics including reliability, comfort, speed, and adaptability. The top-performing methods used unsupervised learning to detect and separate lane lines with processing time under 10 ms per frame, outperforming compute-intensive and poor generalizing deep learning approaches. These approaches demonstrated robustness across lighting conditions, road textures, and lane geometries. The findings highlight the potential for efficient lane detection approaches to enhance the accessibility and reliability of autonomous vehicle technologies. Reducing computing requirements enables lane keeping to be widely deployed in vehicles as part of lower-level automation, including active safety systems.
In video lane detection, there are rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which is under-explored in existing lane detectors. In this work, we propose LaneTCA to bridge the individual video frames and explore how to effectively aggregate the temporal context. Technically, we develop an accumulative attention module and an adjacent attention module to abstract the long-term and short-term temporal context, respectively. The accumulative attention module continuously accumulates visual information during the journey of a vehicle, while the adjacent attention module propagates this lane information from the previous frame to the current frame. The two modules are meticulously designed based on the transformer architecture. Finally, these long-short context features are fused with the current frame features to predict the lane lines in the current frame. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted on two prevalent benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving several new state-of-the-art records. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/Alex-1337/LaneTCA
A novel algorithm for video lane detection is proposed in this paper. First, we extract a feature map for a current frame and detect a latent mask for obstacles occluding lanes. Then, we enhance the feature map by developing an occlusion-aware memory-based refinement (OMR) module. It takes the obstacle mask and feature map from the current frame, previous output, and memory information as input, and processes them recursively in a video. Moreover, we apply a novel data augmentation scheme for training the OMR module effectively. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing techniques on video lane datasets. Our codes are available at https://github.com/dongkwonjin/OMR.
As one of the basic while vital technologies for HD map construction, 3D lane detection is still an open problem due to varying visual conditions, complex typologies, and strict demands for precision. In this paper, an end-to-end flexible and hierarchical lane detector is proposed to precisely predict 3D lane lines from point clouds. Specifically, we design a hierarchical network predicting flexible representations of lane shapes at different levels, simultaneously collecting global instance semantics and avoiding local errors. In the global scope, we propose to regress parametric curves w.r.t adaptive axes that help to make more robust predictions towards complex scenes, while in the local vision the structure of lane segment is detected in each of the dynamic anchor cells sampled along the global predicted curves. Moreover, corresponding global and local shape matching losses and anchor cell generation strategies are designed. Experiments on two datasets show that we overwhelm current top methods under high precision standards, and full ablation studies also verify each part of our method. Our codes will be released at https://github.com/Doo-do/FHLD.
Concurrent processing of multiple autonomous driving 3D perception tasks within the same spatiotemporal scene poses a significant challenge, in particular due to the computational inefficiencies and feature competition between tasks when using traditional multi-task learning approaches. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a novel unified representation, RepVF, which harmonizes the representation of various perception tasks such as 3D object detection and 3D lane detection within a single framework. RepVF characterizes the structure of different targets in the scene through a vector field, enabling a single-head, multi-task learning model that significantly reduces computational redundancy and feature competition. Building upon RepVF, we introduce RFTR, a network designed to exploit the inherent connections between different tasks by utilizing a hierarchical structure of queries that implicitly model the relationships both between and within tasks. This approach eliminates the need for task-specific heads and parameters, fundamentally reducing the conflicts inherent in traditional multi-task learning paradigms. We validate our approach by combining labels from the OpenLane dataset with the Waymo Open dataset. Our work presents a significant advancement in the efficiency and effectiveness of multi-task perception in autonomous driving, offering a new perspective on handling multiple 3D perception tasks synchronously and in parallel. The code will be available at: https://github.com/jbji/RepVF
Accurate 3D lane estimation is crucial for ensuring safety in autonomous driving. However, prevailing monocular techniques suffer from depth loss and lighting variations, hampering accurate 3D lane detection. In contrast, LiDAR points offer geometric cues and enable precise localization. In this paper, we present DV-3DLane, a novel end-to-end Dual-View multi-modal 3D Lane detection framework that synergizes the strengths of both images and LiDAR points. We propose to learn multi-modal features in dual-view spaces, i.e., perspective view (PV) and bird's-eye-view (BEV), effectively leveraging the modal-specific information. To achieve this, we introduce three designs: 1) A bidirectional feature fusion strategy that integrates multi-modal features into each view space, exploiting their unique strengths. 2) A unified query generation approach that leverages lane-aware knowledge from both PV and BEV spaces to generate queries. 3) A 3D dual-view deformable attention mechanism, which aggregates discriminative features from both PV and BEV spaces into queries for accurate 3D lane detection. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark, OpenLane, demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of DV-3DLane. It achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a remarkable 11.2 gain in F1 score and a substantial 53.5% reduction in errors. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/JMoonr/dv-3dlane}.
3D lane detection and topology reasoning are essential tasks in autonomous driving scenarios, requiring not only detecting the accurate 3D coordinates on lane lines, but also reasoning the relationship between lanes and traffic elements. Current vision-based methods, whether explicitly constructing BEV features or not, all establish the lane anchors/queries in 3D space while ignoring the 2D lane priors. In this study, we propose Topo2D, a novel framework based on Transformer, leveraging 2D lane instances to initialize 3D queries and 3D positional embeddings. Furthermore, we explicitly incorporate 2D lane features into the recognition of topology relationships among lane centerlines and between lane centerlines and traffic elements. Topo2D achieves 44.5% OLS on multi-view topology reasoning benchmark OpenLane-V2 and 62.6% F-Socre on single-view 3D lane detection benchmark OpenLane, exceeding the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods.
Road lanes are integral components of the visual perception systems in intelligent vehicles, playing a pivotal role in safe navigation. In lane detection tasks, balancing accuracy with real-time performance is essential, yet existing methods often sacrifice one for the other. To address this trade-off, we introduce CLRKDNet, a streamlined model that balances detection accuracy with real-time performance. The state-of-the-art model CLRNet has demonstrated exceptional performance across various datasets, yet its computational overhead is substantial due to its Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and muti-layer detection head architecture. Our method simplifies both the FPN structure and detection heads, redesigning them to incorporate a novel teacher-student distillation process alongside a newly introduced series of distillation losses. This combination reduces inference time by up to 60% while maintaining detection accuracy comparable to CLRNet. This strategic balance of accuracy and speed makes CLRKDNet a viable solution for real-time lane detection tasks in autonomous driving applications.
Semantic segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving, particularly for Drivable Area and Lane Segmentation, ensuring safety and navigation. To address the high computational costs of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, this paper introduces TwinLiteNetPlus (TwinLiteNet$^+$), a model adept at balancing efficiency and accuracy. TwinLiteNet$^+$ incorporates standard and depth-wise separable dilated convolutions, reducing complexity while maintaining high accuracy. It is available in four configurations, from the robust 1.94 million-parameter TwinLiteNet$^+_{\text{Large}}$ to the ultra-compact 34K-parameter TwinLiteNet$^+_{\text{Nano}}$. Notably, TwinLiteNet$^+_{\text{Large}}$ attains a 92.9\% mIoU for Drivable Area Segmentation and a 34.2\% IoU for Lane Segmentation. These results notably outperform those of current SOTA models while requiring a computational cost that is approximately 11 times lower in terms of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) compared to the existing SOTA model. Extensively tested on various embedded devices, TwinLiteNet$^+$ demonstrates promising latency and power efficiency, underscoring its suitability for real-world autonomous vehicle applications.
Lane detection is to determine the precise location and shape of lanes on the road. Despite efforts made by current methods, it remains a challenging task due to the complexity of real-world scenarios. Existing approaches, whether proposal-based or keypoint-based, suffer from depicting lanes effectively and efficiently. Proposal-based methods detect lanes by distinguishing and regressing a collection of proposals in a streamlined top-down way, yet lack sufficient flexibility in lane representation. Keypoint-based methods, on the other hand, construct lanes flexibly from local descriptors, which typically entail complicated post-processing. In this paper, we present a "Sketch-and-Refine" paradigm that utilizes the merits of both keypoint-based and proposal-based methods. The motivation is that local directions of lanes are semantically simple and clear. At the "Sketch" stage, local directions of keypoints can be easily estimated by fast convolutional layers. Then we can build a set of lane proposals accordingly with moderate accuracy. At the "Refine" stage, we further optimize these proposals via a novel Lane Segment Association Module (LSAM), which allows adaptive lane segment adjustment. Last but not least, we propose multi-level feature integration to enrich lane feature representations more efficiently. Based on the proposed "Sketch and Refine" paradigm, we propose a fast yet effective lane detector dubbed "SRLane". Experiments show that our SRLane can run at a fast speed (i.e., 278 FPS) while yielding an F1 score of 78.9\%. The source code is available at: https://github.com/passerer/SRLane.
Inspired by human driving focus, this research pioneers networks augmented with Focusing Sampling, Partial Field of View Evaluation, Enhanced FPN architecture and Directional IoU Loss - targeted innovations addressing obstacles to precise lane detection for autonomous driving. Experiments demonstrate our Focusing Sampling strategy, emphasizing vital distant details unlike uniform approaches, significantly boosts both benchmark and practical curved/distant lane recognition accuracy essential for safety. While FENetV1 achieves state-of-the-art conventional metric performance via enhancements isolating perspective-aware contexts mimicking driver vision, FENetV2 proves most reliable on the proposed Partial Field analysis. Hence we specifically recommend V2 for practical lane navigation despite fractional degradation on standard entire-image measures. Future directions include collecting on-road data and integrating complementary dual frameworks to further breakthroughs guided by human perception principles. The Code is available at https://github.com/HanyangZhong/FENet.
Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model's performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.
Unsupervised representation learning aims at finding methods that learn representations from data without annotation-based signals. Abstaining from annotations not only leads to economic benefits but may - and to some extent already does - result in advantages regarding the representation's structure, robustness, and generalizability to different tasks. In the long run, unsupervised methods are expected to surpass their supervised counterparts due to the reduction of human intervention and the inherently more general setup that does not bias the optimization towards an objective originating from specific annotation-based signals. While major advantages of unsupervised representation learning have been recently observed in natural language processing, supervised methods still dominate in vision domains for most tasks. In this dissertation, we contribute to the field of unsupervised (visual) representation learning from three perspectives: (i) Learning representations: We design unsupervised, backpropagation-free Convolutional Self-Organizing Neural Networks (CSNNs) that utilize self-organization- and Hebbian-based learning rules to learn convolutional kernels and masks to achieve deeper backpropagation-free models. (ii) Evaluating representations: We build upon the widely used (non-)linear evaluation protocol to define pretext- and target-objective-independent metrics for measuring and investigating the objective function mismatch between various unsupervised pretext tasks and target tasks. (iii) Transferring representations: We contribute CARLANE, the first 3-way sim-to-real domain adaptation benchmark for 2D lane detection, and a method based on prototypical self-supervised learning. Finally, we contribute a content-consistent unpaired image-to-image translation method that utilizes masks, global and local discriminators, and similarity sampling to mitigate content inconsistencies.