BIPOOLNET: An advanced UNet architecture for enhanced lane detection in autonomous vehicles

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous vehicle technology, the imperative to bolster safety within smart urban ecosystems has never been more critical. This endeavor requires the deployment of advanced detection systems capable of navigating the intricacies of pedestrian, near-vehicle, and lane detection challenges, with a particular focus on the nuanced requirements of curved lane navigation – a domain where traditional AI models exhibit notable deficiencies. This paper introduces BIPOOLNET, an innovative encoder-decoder neural architecture, ingeniously augmented with a feature pyramid to facilitate the precise delineation of curved lane geometries. BIPOOLNET integrates max pooling and average pooling to extract critical features and mitigate the complexity of the feature map, redefining the benchmarks for lane detection technology. Rigorous evaluation using the TuSimple dataset underscores BIPOOLNET’s exemplary performance, evidenced by an unprecedented accuracy rate of 98.45%, an F1-score of 98.17%, and notably minimal false positive (1.84%) and false negative (1.09%) rates. These findings not only affirm BIPOOLNET’s supremacy over extant models but also signal a paradigm shift in enhancing the safety and navigational precision of autonomous vehicles, offering a scalable, robust solution to the multifaceted challenges posed by real-world driving dynamics.