On Enhancing Lane Estimation Using Contextual Cues

Vision-based lane detection is a critical component of modern automotive active safety systems. Although a number of robust and accurate lane estimation (LE) algorithms have been proposed, computationally efficient systems that can be realized on embedded platforms have been less explored and addressed. This paper presents a framework that incorporates contextual cues for LE to further enhance the performance in terms of both computational efficiency and accuracy. The proposed context-aware LE framework considers the state of the ego vehicle, its surroundings, and the system-level requirements to adapt and scale the LE process resulting in substantial computational savings. This is accomplished by synergistically fusing data from multiple sensors along with the visual data to define the context around the ego vehicle. The context is then incorporated as an input to the LE process to scale it depending on the contextual requirements. A detailed evaluation of the proposed framework on real-world driving conditions shows that the dynamic and static configuration of the lane detection process results in computation savings as high as 90%, without compromising on the accuracy of LE.