CARLANE: A Lane Detection Benchmark for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation from Simulation to multiple Real-World Domains

TL;DR

CARLANE is a comprehensive benchmark dataset for evaluating unsupervised domain adaptation methods in 2D lane detection across simulation and multiple real-world domains, addressing a key gap in autonomous driving research.

Contribution

The paper introduces CARLANE, a new large-scale sim-to-real lane detection benchmark with multiple datasets and provides baseline evaluations using a novel self-supervised learning approach.

Findings

High false positive and false negative rates in domain adaptation methods compared to supervised baselines.

CARLANE datasets cover diverse scenes with 163K images, 118K annotated.

Baseline methods show significant room for improvement in unsupervised lane detection.

Abstract

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation demonstrates great potential to mitigate domain shifts by transferring models from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. While Unsupervised Domain Adaptation has been applied to a wide variety of complex vision tasks, only few works focus on lane detection for autonomous driving. This can be attributed to the lack of publicly available datasets. To facilitate research in these directions, we propose CARLANE, a 3-way sim-to-real domain adaptation benchmark for 2D lane detection. CARLANE encompasses the single-target datasets MoLane and TuLane and the multi-target dataset MuLane. These datasets are built from three different domains, which cover diverse scenes and contain a total of 163K unique images, 118K of which are annotated. In addition we evaluate and report systematic baselines, including our own method, which builds upon Prototypical Cross-domain Self-supervised Learning. We find that false positive and false negative rates of the evaluated domain adaptation methods are high compared to those of fully supervised baselines. This affirms the need for benchmarks such as CARLANE to further strengthen research in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for lane detection. CARLANE, all evaluated models and the corresponding implementations are publicly available at https://carlanebenchmark.github.io.