Context-Aware Sim-to-Real Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Lane Detection via Disentangled Feature Alignment

While existing supervised deep learning-based lane detection methods achieve exceptional detection performance, constructing a large real-world dataset with labels is a cost-intensive task. Therefore, we propose a novel sim-to-real unsupervised domain adaptation method specialized in lane detection. In this paper, we present a disentangled feature alignment approach that performs selective adaptation for lane and background features. By performing the disentangled prototype-based local and global feature alignments, we solve the negative transfer problem of an existing adversarial feature alignment-based domain adaptation for lane detection. In addition, the lane detection task requires accurate localization of the lanes even in occluded parts. Therefore, we adopt a consistency regularization strategy using masked images to improve the detection accuracy in the occluded area. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive resolution adjustment of the masked-out patch based on training maturity for context learning. By applying a simple framework, we achieve superior lane detection accuracy with lower false positives and false negatives in the target domain compared to conventional methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.