Effective lane detection on complex roads with convolutional attention mechanism in autonomous vehicles

Abstract Autonomous Vehicles (AV’s) have achieved more popularity in vehicular technology in recent years. For the development of secure and safe driving, these AV’s help to reduce the uncertainties such as crashes, heavy traffic, pedestrian behaviours, random objects, lane detection, different types of roads and their surrounding environments. In AV’s, Lane Detection is one of the most important aspects which helps in lane holding guidance and lane departure warning. From Literature, it is observed that existing deep learning models perform better on well maintained roads and in favourable weather conditions. However, performance in extreme weather conditions and curvy roads need focus. The proposed work focuses on presenting an accurate lane detection approach on poor roads, particularly those with curves, broken lanes, or no lane markings and extreme weather conditions. Lane Detection with Convolutional Attention Mechanism (LD-CAM) model is proposed to achieve this outcome. The proposed method comprises an encoder, an enhanced convolution block attention module (E-CBAM), and a decoder. The encoder unit extracts the input image features, while the E-CBAM focuses on quality of feature maps in input images extracted from the encoder, and the decoder provides output without loss of any information in the original image. The work is carried out using the distinct data from three datasets called Tusimple for different weather condition images, Curve Lanes for different curve lanes images and Cracks and Potholes for damaged road images. The proposed model trained using these datasets showcased an improved performance attaining an Accuracy of 97.90%, Precision of 98.92%, F1-Score of 97.90%, IoU of 98.50% and Dice Co-efficient as 98.80% on both structured and defective roads in extreme weather conditions.