# Sparse Laneformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07821 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07821/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Spatial As Deep: Spatial CNN for Traffic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06080/) (2017)
- [Learning Lightweight Lane Detection CNNs by Self Attention Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00821/) (2019)
- [PersFormer: 3D Lane Detection via Perspective Transformer and the OpenLane Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11089/) (2022)
- [Keep your Eyes on the Lane: Real-time Attention-guided Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12035/) (2020)
- [SCNN: An Accelerator for Compressed-sparse Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04485/) (2017)
- [Ultra Fast Structure-aware Deep Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11757/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Lane Shape Prediction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04233/) (2020)
- [PolyLaneNet: Lane Estimation via Deep Polynomial Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10924/) (2020)
- [CondLaneNet: a Top-to-down Lane Detection Framework Based on Conditional Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05003/) (2021)
- [CLRNet: Cross Layer Refinement Network for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10350/) (2022)
- [CurveLane-NAS: Unifying Lane-Sensitive Architecture Search and Adaptive Point Blending](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12147/) (2020)
- [RESA: Recurrent Feature-Shift Aggregator for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13719/) (2020)
- [A Keypoint-based Global Association Network for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07335/) (2022)
- [Focus on Local: Detecting Lane Marker from Bottom Up via Key Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13680/) (2021)
- [LaneAF: Robust Multi-Lane Detection with Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12040/) (2021)
- [EL-GAN: Embedding Loss Driven Generative Adversarial Networks for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05525/) (2018)
- [FastDraw: Addressing the Long Tail of Lane Detection by Adapting a Sequential Prediction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04354/) (2019)
- [Structure Guided Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05403/) (2021)
- [Laneformer: Object-aware Row-Column Transformers for Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09830/) (2022)
- [Robust Lane Detection via Expanded Self Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07037/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Lane detection with One-to-Several Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00675/) (2023)
- [Ego-Lane Analysis System (ELAS): Dataset and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05984/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Monocular Lane Detection Based on Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16316/) (2024)
- [Polar R-CNN: End-to-End Lane Detection with Fewer Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01499/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lane detection is a fundamental task in autonomous driving, and has achieved great progress as deep learning emerges. Previous anchor-based methods often design dense anchors, which highly depend on the training dataset and remain fixed during inference. We analyze that dense anchors are not necessary for lane detection, and propose a transformer-based lane detection framework based on a sparse anchor mechanism. To this end, we generate sparse anchors with position-aware lane queries and angle queries instead of traditional explicit anchors. We adopt Horizontal Perceptual Attention (HPA) to aggregate the lane features along the horizontal direction, and adopt Lane-Angle Cross Attention (LACA) to perform interactions between lane queries and angle queries. We also propose Lane Perceptual Attention (LPA) based on deformable cross attention to further refine the lane predictions. Our method, named Sparse Laneformer, is easy-to-implement and end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sparse Laneformer performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., surpassing Laneformer by 3.0% F1 score and O2SFormer by 0.7% F1 score with fewer MACs on CULane with the same ResNet-34 backbone.