Enhanced Road Lane Detection Facing Sun Glare

There are several studies on road lane detection but very few address adverse conditions for acquisition such as sun glare. Loss of details in underexposed images captured facing a low sun leads to misleading road lane detection. High Dynamic Range Imaging methods are used to acquire most details in such scenes. Unfortunately, these techniques are heavy on computations and therefore unsuitable for real time road lane detection. In this paper, we propose a machine learning solution that avoids High Dynamic Range Imaging computations that are the radiance map estimation, tone-mapping algorithms and quality measures calculation. We train a neural network on a High Dynamic Range Imaging dataset. The resulting model produces suitable images for road lane detection facing sun glare, in real time. Subjective and objective comparisons with the most popular High Dynamic Range Imaging method, Mertens Algorithm, are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed Neural Network. The delivered images demonstrated an improvement in road lane detection.