Pixel Level Segmentation Based Drivable Road Region Detection and Steering Angle Estimation Method for Autonomous Driving on Unstructured Roads
Marya Rasib, Muhammad Atif Butt, Faisal Riaz, Adel Sulaiman, Muhammad Akram
Abstract
With the recent emergence of deep learning, computer vision-based applications have demonstrated better applicability in accomplishing driving tasks including drivable road region detection, lane keeping and steering control in self-driving vehicles. Till recently, numerous lane-marking detection based steering control and lane keeping methods have been proposed to perform autonomous driving on urban well-structured roads. But the matter of fact is that these methods are not feasible on roads where lane markings are not available or faded over time which makes drivable road region detection a crucial task. Also, it is highly difficult task to estimate the steering angle on such highly deteriorated roads using existing road detection and steering angle estimation methods. To the best of our knowledge, there is no standard benchmark available for drivable road region detection and steering angle estimation on unstructured roads. To this end, we present a large-scale dataset for drivable road detection, comprising of 15,000-pixel level high-quality fine annotations. Also, we present a novel end-to-end drivable road region detection and steering angle estimation method to ensure the autonomous driving on unstructured roads. The proposed method performs pixel-level segmentation to extract drivable road region and calculates the lane interception to estimate the steering angle of self-driving vehicles. Lastly, a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis has been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset, road detection and steering angle estimation method. Our benchmark is available at https://carl-dataset.github.io/index/.