LLFormer: An Efficient and Real-time LiDAR Lane Detection Method based on Transformer

Lane detection has been one of the most important functions in the autonomous driving perception module. Most of the current research require complex post-processing and curve fitting processes before they can be used by subsequent regulation modules. In this paper, we propose the LLFormer algorithm combining CNN and Transformer structure, which is the first attempt to perform end-to-end lane detection based on laser point cloud and output its cubic polynomial coefficients. In addition, this paper modifies the structure of the conventional transformer and proposes the Generating Lane Query (GLQ) module. The output of encoder is plugged into GLQ for initialization of lane query in decoder, preserving the uniqueness of each frame of point cloud data. We test the performance of the proposed algorithm in the public dataset K-Lane, and the results show that the accuracy of the proposed LLFormer is close to the existing SOTA algorithm. The number of model parameters of LLFormer is only 9.01M, and the amount of operations is only 0.19GFLOPs, which are 1/26 and 1/2937 of the existing SOTA algorithm, respectively. The frequency of inference calculation is 35.9FPS, which can fully meet the real-time requirements for industrial deployment.