Interactive Attention Learning on Detection of Lane and Lane Marking on the Road by Monocular Camera Image

Vision-based identification of lane area and lane marking on the road is an indispensable function for intelligent driving vehicles, especially for localization, mapping and planning tasks. However, due to the increasing complexity of traffic scenes, such as occlusion and discontinuity, detecting lanes and lane markings from an image captured by a monocular camera becomes persistently challenging. The lanes and lane markings have a strong position correlation and are constrained by a spatial geometry prior to the driving scene. Most existing studies only explore a single task, i.e., either lane marking or lane detection, and do not consider the inherent connection or exploit the modeling of this kind of relationship between both elements to improve the detection performance of both tasks. In this paper, we establish a novel multi-task encoder–decoder framework for the simultaneous detection of lanes and lane markings. This approach deploys a dual-branch architecture to extract image information from different scales. By revealing the spatial constraints between lanes and lane markings, we propose an interactive attention learning for their feature information, which involves a Deformable Feature Fusion module for feature encoding, a Cross-Context module as information decoder, a Cross-IoU loss and a Focal-style loss weighting for robust training. Without bells and whistles, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on tasks of lane marking detection (with 32.53% on IoU, 81.61% on accuracy) and lane segmentation (with 91.72% on mIoU) of the BDD100K dataset, which showcases an improvement of 6.33% on IoU, 11.11% on accuracy in lane marking detection and 0.22% on mIoU in lane detection compared to the previous methods.