Decoupling the Curve Modeling and Pavement Regression for Lane Detection

The curve-based lane representation is a popular approach in many lane detection methods, as it allows for the representation of lanes as a whole object and maximizes the use of holistic information about the lanes. However, the curves produced by these methods may not fit well with irregular lines, which can lead to gaps in performance compared to indirect representations such as segmentation-based or point-based methods. We have observed that these lanes are not intended to be irregular, but they appear zigzagged in the perspective view due to being drawn on uneven pavement. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the lane detection task by decomposing it into two parts: curve modeling and ground height regression. Specifically, we use a parameterized curve to represent lanes in the BEV space to reflect the original distribution of lanes. For the second part, since ground heights are determined by natural factors such as road conditions and are less holistic, we regress the ground heights of key points separately from the curve modeling. Additionally, we have unified the 2D and 3D lane detection tasks by designing a new framework and a series of losses to guide the optimization of models with or without 3D lane labels. Our experiments on 2D lane detection benchmarks (TuSimple and CULane), as well as the recently proposed 3D lane detection datasets (ONCE-3Dlane and OpenLane), have shown significant improvements. We will make our well-documented source code publicly available.