FusionLane: Multi-Sensor Fusion for Lane Marking Semantic Segmentation Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

Effective semantic segmentation of lane marking is crucial for construction of high-precision lane level maps. In recent years, a number of different methods for semantic segmentation of images have been proposed. These methods concentrate mainly on analysis of camera images, due to limitations with the sensor itself, and thus far, the accurate three-dimensional spatial position of the lane marking could not be obtained, which hinders lane level map construction.This article proposes a lane marking semantic segmentation method based on LIDAR and camera image fusion using a deep neural network. In the approach, the object of the semantic segmentation is a bird’s-eye view converted from a LIDAR points cloud instead of an image captured by a camera. First, the DeepLabV3+ network image segmentation method is used to segment the image captured by the camera, and the segmentation result is then merged with the point clouds collected by the LIDAR as the input of the proposed network. A long short-term memory (LSTM) structure is added to the neural network to assist the network in semantic segmentation of lane markings by enabling use of time series information. Experiments on datasets containing more than 14,000 images, which were manually labeled and expanded, showed that the proposed method provides accurate semantic segmentation of the bird’s-eye view LIDAR points cloud. Consequently, automation of high-precision map construction can be significantly improved. Our code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/rolandying/FusionLane</uri> .