HoughLaneNet: Lane Detection with Deep Hough Transform and Dynamic Convolution

TL;DR

HoughLaneNet introduces a hierarchical Deep Hough Transform combined with dynamic convolution to enhance lane detection, especially in occluded or complex scenarios, by leveraging lane geometry and adaptive feature differentiation.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel hierarchical Deep Hough Transform and dynamic convolution approach for improved lane detection in challenging conditions.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in occluded lane detection

Effectively differentiates lanes using dynamic convolution kernels

Improves detection accuracy in heavily worn or fragmented lanes

Abstract

The task of lane detection has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving due to its complexity. Lanes can present difficulties for detection, as they can be narrow, fragmented, and often obscured by heavy traffic. However, it has been observed that the lanes have a geometrical structure that resembles a straight line, leading to improved lane detection results when utilizing this characteristic. To address this challenge, we propose a hierarchical Deep Hough Transform (DHT) approach that combines all lane features in an image into the Hough parameter space. Additionally, we refine the point selection method and incorporate a Dynamic Convolution Module to effectively differentiate between lanes in the original image. Our network architecture comprises a backbone network, either a ResNet or Pyramid Vision Transformer, a Feature Pyramid Network as the neck to extract multi-scale features, and a hierarchical DHT-based feature aggregation head to accurately segment each lane. By utilizing the lane features in the Hough parameter space, the network learns dynamic convolution kernel parameters corresponding to each lane, allowing the Dynamic Convolution Module to effectively differentiate between lane features. Subsequently, the lane features are fed into the feature decoder, which predicts the final position of the lane. Our proposed network structure demonstrates improved performance in detecting heavily occluded or worn lane images, as evidenced by our extensive experimental results, which show that our method outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art techniques.