Technical Paper
Real World Use Case Evaluation of Radar Retro-reflectors for Autonomous Vehicle Lane Detection Application
2024-04-09
2024-01-2042
Lane detection plays a critical role in autonomous vehicles for safe and reliable navigation. Lane detection is traditionally accomplished using a camera sensor and computer vision processing. The downside of this traditional technique is that it can be computationally intensive when high quality images at a fast frame rate are used and has reliability issues from occlusion such as, glare, shadows, active road construction, and more. This study addresses these issues by exploring alternative methods for lane detection in specific scenarioscaused from road construction-induced lane shift and sun glare. Specifically, a U-Net camera-based lane detection method is compared with a radar-based approach using a new type of sensor previously unused in the autonomous vehicle space: radar retro-reflectors. This evaluation is performed using ground truth data, obtained by measuring the lane positions and transforming them into pixel coordinates.