Sparse Point Guided 3D Lane Detection

3D lane detection usually builds a dense correspondence between the front-view space and the BEV space to estimate lane points in the 3D space. 3D lanes only occupy a small ratio of the dense correspondence, while most correspondence belongs to the redundant background. This sparsity phenomenon bottlenecks valuable computation and raises the computation cost of building a high-resolution correspondence for accurate results. In this paper, we propose a sparse point-guided 3D lane detection, focusing on points related to 3D lanes. Our method runs in a coarse-to-fine manner, including coarse-level lane detection and iterative fine-level sparse point refinements. In coarse-level lane detection, we build a dense but efficient correspondence between the front view and BEV space at a very low resolution to compute coarse lanes. Then in fine-level sparse point refinement, we sample sparse points around coarse lanes to extract local features from the high-resolution front-view feature map. The high-resolution local information brought by sparse points refines 3D lanes in the BEV space hierarchically from low resolution to high resolution. The sparse point guides a more effective information flow and greatly promotes the SOTA result by 3 points on the overall F1-score and 6 points on several hard situations while reducing almost half memory cost and speeding up 2 times.