Real-Time Lane ID Estimation Using Recurrent Neural Networks With Dual Convention

Abstract

Acquiring information about the road lane structure is a crucial step for autonomous navigation. To this end, several approaches tackle this task from different perspectives such as lane marking detection or semantic lane segmentation. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is yet no purely vision based end-to-end solution to answer the precise question: How to estimate the relative number or "ID" of the current driven lane within a multilane road or a highway? In this work, we propose a real-time, vision-only (i.e. monocular camera) solution to the problem based on a dual left-right convention. We interpret this task as a classification problem by limiting the maximum number of lane candidates to eight. Our approach is designed to meet low-complexity specifications and limited runtime requirements. It harnesses the temporal dimension inherent to the input sequences to improve upon high-complexity stateof-the-art models. We achieve more than 95% accuracy on a challenging test set with extreme conditions and different routes.