TY  - EJOU
AU  - Waheed, Ahtisham 
AU  - Yin, Yunfie 
AU  - Noor, Abu Fatema Mohammad Abdun 
AU  - Ahasan, Md Imam 
AU  - Goh, Kah Ong Michael 
AU  - Mahmud, S. M. Hasan 
AU  - Rashid, Umar 

TI  - Direction-Curvature Aware Feature Integration for Robust Lane Detection
T2  - Computers, Materials \& Continua

PY  - 
VL  - 
IS  - 
SN  - 1546-2226

AB  - Robust lane detection is a fundamental perception task for autonomous driving and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. However, it remains challenging in real-world environments due to degraded lane markings, complex road topologies, occlusions, and adverse illumination conditions. This work aims to improve lane detection robustness by explicitly modeling lane geometric properties while preserving end-to-end efficiency. We propose a direction-curvature aware lane detection framework that integrates a novel Direction-Curvature Aware (DCA) attention module into an anchor-based architecture. The DCA module enables tangent-aligned feature aggregation guided by learned direction fields and curvature-consistent attention. In addition, we introduce a direction-aware optimization objective termed Directional Lane IoU (DLIoU) to enforce directional consistency between predicted and ground-truth lanes during training. Extensive experiments on the CULane and TuSimple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving notable improvements on CULane under challenging conditions including occlusion, strong curvature, shadows, and night-time scenes, and consistent gains on TuSimple, while maintaining competitive inference speed. These results confirm that explicitly incorporating direction and curvature information into both feature learning and optimization leads to more accurate and robust lane detection in complex driving environments.
KW  - Lane detection; deep learning; attention mechanism; curvature-aware modeling; anchor-based detection; autonomous driving; computer vision

DO  - 10.32604/cmc.2026.083456