Embedding Structured Contour and Location Prior in Siamesed Fully Convolutional Networks for Road Detection

Road detection from the perspective of moving vehicles is a challenging issue in autonomous driving. Recently, many deep learning methods spring up for this task, because they can extract high-level local features to find road regions from raw RGB data, such as convolutional neural networks and fully convolutional networks (FCNs). However, how to detect the boundary of road accurately is still an intractable problem. In this paper, we propose siamesed FCNs (named “s-FCN-loc”), which is able to consider RGB-channel images, semantic contours, and location priors simultaneously to segment the road region elaborately. To be specific, the s-FCN-loc has two streams to process the original RGB images and contour maps, respectively. At the same time, the location prior is directly appended to the siamesed FCN to promote the final detection performance. Our contributions are threefold: 1) An s-FCN-loc is proposed that learns more discriminative features of road boundaries than the original FCN to detect more accurate road regions. 2) Location prior is viewed as a type of feature map and directly appended to the final feature map in s-FCN-loc to promote the detection performance effectively, which is easier than other traditional methods, namely, different priors for different inputs (image patches). 3) The convergent speed of training s-FCN-loc model is 30% faster than the original FCN because of the guidance of highly structured contours. The proposed approach is evaluated on the KITTI road detection benchmark and one-class road detection data set, and achieves a competitive result with the state of the arts.