DeepLane

Abstract

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.