Fast drivable areas estimation with multi-task learning for real-time autonomous driving assistant

Autonomous driving is a safety-critical application that requires a high-level understanding of computer vision with real-time inference. In this study, we focus on the computational efficiency of an important factor by improving the running time and performing multiple tasks simultaneously for practical applications. We propose a fast and accurate multi-task learning-based architecture for joint segmentation of drivable area, lane line, and classification of the scene. An encoder–decoder architecture efficiently handles input frames through shared representation. A comprehensive understanding of the driving environment is improved by generalization and regularization from different tasks. The proposed method learns end-to-end through multi-task learning on a very challenging Berkeley Deep Drive dataset and shows its robustness for three tasks in autonomous driving. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other multi-task learning approaches in both speed and accuracy. The computational efficiency of the method was over 93.81 fps at inference, enabling execution in real-time.