HSDF-Lane: Height-Aligned Signed Distance Field with Semantic Lane Prior for 3D Lane Detection

Monocular 3D lane detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving, yet recovering reliable 3D geometry from a single image remains challenging due to inherent depth ambiguity. Prior methods project image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space under a flat-ground assumption, causing geometric distortion on real-world roads. Recent methods instead predict explicit height maps to capture non-planar surfaces, but still rely on sparse anchor-based regression and exploit the recovered geometry merely for spatial transformation rather than semantic understanding. To overcome these limitations, we propose HSDF-Lane, which implicitly models the road surface as a Height-aligned Signed Distance Field (HSDF) over a densely sampled 3D feature volume. Through differentiable rendering, the HSDF jointly produces an accurate height map and surface-aligned features. We further introduce Lane-aware Semantic Positional Encoding (LSPE), which injects a lane-existence prior derived from the surface-aligned features into the transformer queries, coupling geometric structure with semantic guidance. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane benchmark show that HSDF-Lane achieves state-of-the-art performance in both 3D lane detection and height map estimation.