# Spatial As Deep: Spatial CNN for Traffic Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06080/

## Key facts

- Cited by 187 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 187)

- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08920/) (2022)
- [SpatialBot: Precise Spatial Understanding with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13642/) (2024)
- [PersFormer: 3D Lane Detection via Perspective Transformer and the OpenLane Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11089/) (2022)
- [CondLaneNet: a Top-to-down Lane Detection Framework Based on Conditional Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05003/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Efficient Lane Detection via Curve Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02431/) (2022)
- [OpenLane-V2: A Topology Reasoning Benchmark for Unified 3D HD Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10440/) (2023)
- [YOLOP: You Only Look Once for Panoptic Driving Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11250/) (2021)
- [CLRNet: Cross Layer Refinement Network for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10350/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Vectorized HD-map Construction with Piecewise Bezier Curve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09700/) (2023)
- [A Keypoint-based Global Association Network for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07335/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [Focus on Local: Detecting Lane Marker from Bottom Up via Key Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13680/) (2021)
- [Graph-based Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05277/) (2023)
- [Online Map Vectorization for Autonomous Driving: A Rasterization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10502/) (2023)
- [Anchor3DLane: Learning to Regress 3D Anchors for Monocular 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02371/) (2023)
- [ONCE-3DLanes: Building Monocular 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00301/) (2022)
- [LATR: 3D Lane Detection from Monocular Images with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04583/) (2023)
- [LaneAF: Robust Multi-Lane Detection with Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12040/) (2021)
- [CurveFormer: 3D Lane Detection by Curve Propagation with Curve Queries and Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07989/) (2022)
- [Ultra Fast Deep Lane Detection with Hybrid Anchor Driven Ordinal Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07389/) (2022)
- [Learning to Drive by Watching YouTube Videos: Action-Conditioned Contrastive Policy Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02393/) (2022)
- [Eigenlanes: Data-Driven Lane Descriptors for Structurally Diverse Lanes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15302/) (2022)
- [Physical Backdoor Attacks to Lane Detection Systems in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00858/) (2022)
- [Learning to Predict 3D Lane Shape and Camera Pose from a Single Image via Geometry Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15351/) (2021)
- [HybridNets: End-to-End Perception Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09035/) (2022)
- [Robust Table Detection and Structure Recognition from Heterogeneous Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09056/) (2022)
- [Structure Guided Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05403/) (2021)
- [TSRFormer: Table Structure Recognition with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04921/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Physical-world Backdoor Attacks on Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05553/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are usually built by stacking convolutional operations layer-by-layer. Although CNN has shown strong capability to extract semantics from raw pixels, its capacity to capture spatial relationships of pixels across rows and columns of an image is not fully explored. These relationships are important to learn semantic objects with strong shape priors but weak appearance coherences, such as traffic lanes, which are often occluded or not even painted on the road surface as shown in Fig. 1 (a). In this paper, we propose Spatial CNN (SCNN), which generalizes traditional deep layer-by-layer convolutions to slice-byslice convolutions within feature maps, thus enabling message passings between pixels across rows and columns in a layer. Such SCNN is particular suitable for long continuous shape structure or large objects, with strong spatial relationship but less appearance clues, such as traffic lanes, poles, and wall. We apply SCNN on a newly released very challenging traffic lane detection dataset and Cityscapse dataset. The results show that SCNN could learn the spatial relationship for structure output and significantly improves the performance. We show that SCNN outperforms the recurrent neural network (RNN) based ReNet and MRF+CNN (MRFNet) in the lane detection dataset by 8.7% and 4.6% respectively. Moreover, our SCNN won the 1st place on the TuSimple Benchmark Lane Detection Challenge, with an accuracy of 96.53%.