VLDNet: Vision-based lane region detection network for intelligent vehicle system using semantic segmentation

Detection of lane region under the road boundary is an imperative module for intelligent vehicle system. Lane markings provide separate regions on the road for the vehicles to avoid the possibility of accidents. Existing methods in lane detection have limited performance using various sensor-based approaches such as Radar and LiDAR and have high operational costs. To achieve a steady and optimal lane detection, the vision-based lane region detection scheme VLDNet is proposed which utilizes a encoder-decoder network using semantic segmentation architecture. In this direction, a hybrid model using UNet and ResNet has been adopted, where UNet is used as a segmentation model and ResNet-50 is used for down-sampling the image and identifying the required features. These identified features have been then applied into UNet for up-sampling and decoding the segments of the images. The publicly available KITTI dataset have been accessed for experiments and validation of the proposed network. The method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in lane region detection. The network achieves better performance using standard evaluation measures such as accuracy of 98.87%, the precision of 98.24%, recall of 96.55%, frequency weighted IoU of 97.78%, and MaxF score of 97.77%.