An End-to-End Lane Detection Model with Attention and Residual Block

Lane detection, as one of the most important core functions in the autonomous driving environment, is still an open problem. In particular, pursuing high accuracy in complex scenes, such as no line and multiple lane lines, is an urgent issue to be discussed and solved. In this paper, a novel end-to-end lane detection model combining the advantages of attention mechanism and residual block is proposed to address the problem. A residual block alleviates the possible gradient problem. An attention block can help the proposed model centralize on where to focus in the process of learning feature representation, which can make the model itself more sensitive to the feature representation of lane lines through convolutional operations. Additionally, the U-shaped structure with three downsampling operations preserves the image resolution and the original lane line information in the image to the greatest extent. The U-shaped structure can directly output the prediction results to eliminate many complex or unnecessary calculation processes. The experimental results on two public lane detection datasets show that the lane detection performance of the proposed model can achieve high accuracy, and the corresponding weight sizes are only 2.25 M. Finally, to further explain the effectiveness of the proposed model, the unavoidable troubles encountered in the experiment are discussed.