Contrastive Learning for Lane Detection via cross-similarity

Detecting lane markings in road scenes poses a significant challenge due to their intricate nature, which is susceptible to unfavorable conditions. While lane markings have strong shape priors, their visibility is easily compromised by varying lighting conditions, adverse weather, occlusions by other vehicles or pedestrians, road plane changes, and fading of colors over time. The detection process is further complicated by the presence of several lane shapes and natural variations, necessitating large amounts of high-quality and diverse data to train a robust lane detection model capable of handling various real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method termed Contrastive Learning for Lane Detection via Cross-Similarity (CLLD) to enhance the resilience and effectiveness of lane detection models in real-world scenarios, particularly when the visibility of lane markings are compromised. CLLD introduces a novel contrastive learning (CL) method that assesses the similarity of local features within the global context of the input image. It uses the surrounding information to predict lane markings. This is achieved by integrating local feature contrastive learning with our newly proposed operation, dubbed cross-similarity. The local feature CL concentrates on extracting features from small patches, a necessity for accurately localizing lane segments. Meanwhile, cross-similarity captures global features, enabling the detection of obscured lane segments based on their surroundings. We enhance cross-similarity by randomly masking portions of input images in the process of augmentation. Extensive experiments on TuSimple and CuLane benchmark datasets demonstrate that CLLD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods, particularly in visibility-impairing conditions like shadows, while it also delivers comparable results under normal conditions. When compared to supervised learning, CLLD still excels in challenging scenarios such as shadows and crowded scenes, which are common in real-world driving.