RoadPainter: Points Are Ideal Navigators for Topology transformER

Topology reasoning aims to provide a comprehensive and precise understanding of road scenes, enabling autonomous driving systems to identify safe and efficient navigation routes. In this paper, we present RoadPainter, an innovative approach for detecting and reasoning about the topology of lane centerlines using multi-view images. The core concept behind RoadPainter is to extract a set of points from each centerline mask to improve the accuracy of centerline prediction. To achieve this, we start by implementing a transformer decoder that integrates a hybrid attention mechanism and a real-virtual separation strategy to predict coarse lane centerlines and establish topological associations. Subsequently, we generate centerline instance masks guided by the centerline points from the transformer decoder. Moreover, we derive an additional set of points from each mask and combine them with previously detected centerline points for further refinement. Additionally, we introduce an optional module that incorporates a Standard Definition (SD) map to further optimize centerline detection and enhance topological reasoning performance. Experimental evaluations on the OpenLane-V2 dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of RoadPainter.