Robust visual-based method and new datasets for ego-lane index estimation in urban environment

Correct and robust ego-lane index estimation is crucial for autonomous driving in the absence of high-definition maps, especially in urban environments. Previous ego-lane index estimation approaches rely on feature extraction, which limits the robustness. To overcome these shortages, this study proposes a robust ego-lane index estimation framework upon only the original visual image. After optimization of the processing route, the raw image was randomly cropped in the height direction and then input into a double supervised LaneLoc network to obtain the index estimations and confidences. A post-process was also proposed to achieve the global ego-lane index from the estimated left and right indexes with the total lane number. To evaluate our proposed method, we manually annotated the ego-lane index of public datasets which can work as an ego-lane index estimation baseline for the first time. The proposed algorithm achieved 96.48/95.40% (precision/recall) on the CULane dataset and 99.45/99.49% (precision/recall) on the TuSimple dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of lane localization in diverse driving environments. The code and dataset annotation results will be exposed publicly on https://github.com/haomo-ai/LaneLoc.