DeepLane: camera-assisted GPS for driving lane detection

Current smartphone-based navigation applications fail to provide lane-level information due to poor GPS accuracy. Detecting and tracking a vehicle’s lane position on the road assists in lane-level navigation. For instance, it would be important to know whether a vehicle is in the correct lane for safely making a turn, perhaps even alerting the driver in advance if it is not, or whether the vehicle’s speed is compliant with a lane-specific speed limit. Recent efforts have used road network information and inertial sensors to estimate lane position. While inertial sensors can detect lane shifts over short windows, it would suffer from error accumulation over time. In this paper we present DeepLane, a system that leverages the back camera of a windshield-mounted smartphone to provide an accurate estimate of the vehicle’s current lane. We employ a deep learning based technique to classify the vehicle’s lane position. DeepLane does not depend on any infrastructure support such as lane markings and works even when there are no lane markings, a characteristic of many roads in developing regions.

We perform extensive evaluation of DeepLane on real world datasets collected in developed and developing regions. DeepLane can detect vehicle’s lane position with an accuracy of over 90% in both day and night conditions. We have implemented DeepLane as an Android-app that runs at 5 fps on CPU and upto 15 fps on smart-phone’s GPU and can also assist existing navigation applications with lane-level information.