Geo-ORBIT: A Federated Digital Twin Framework for Scene-Adaptive Lane Geometry Detection

Digital Twins (DT) have the potential to transform traffic management and operations by creating dynamic, virtual representations of transportation systems that sense conditions, analyze operations, and support decision-making. A key component for DT of the transportation system is dynamic roadway geometry sensing. However, existing approaches often rely on static maps or costly sensors, limiting scalability and adaptability. Additionally, large-scale DTs that collect and analyze data from multiple sources face challenges in privacy, communication, and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce Geo-ORBIT (Geometrical Operational Roadway Blueprint with Integrated Twin), a unified framework that combines real-time lane detection, DT synchronization, and federated meta-learning. At the core of Geo-ORBIT is GeoLane, a lightweight lane detection model that learns lane geometries from vehicle trajectory data using roadside cameras. We extend this model through Meta-GeoLane, which learns to personalize detection parameters for local entities, and FedMeta-GeoLane, a federated learning strategy that ensures scalable and privacy-preserving adaptation across roadside deployments. Our system is integrated with CARLA and SUMO to create a high-fidelity DT that renders highway scenarios and captures traffic flows in real-time. Extensive experiments across diverse urban scenes show that FedMeta-GeoLane consistently outperforms baseline and meta-learning approaches, achieving lower geometric error and stronger generalization to unseen locations while drastically reducing communication overhead. This work lays the foundation for flexible, context-aware infrastructure modeling in DTs. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/raynbowy23/FedMeta-GeoLane.git.