Dataset "Results of centreline extraction based on maximal disks"

Maps of road layouts play an essential role in autonomous driving, and it is often advantageous to represent them in a compact form, using a sparse set of surveyed points of the lane boundaries. While lane centrelines are valuable references in the prediction and planning of trajectories, most centreline extraction methods only achieve satisfactory accuracy with high computational cost and limited performance in sparsely described scenarios. This paper explores the problem of centreline extraction based on a sparse set of border points, evaluating the performance of different approaches on both a self-created and a public dataset, and proposing a novel method to extract the lane centreline by searching and linking the internal maximal circles along the lane. Compared with other centreline extraction methods producing similar numbers of centre points, the proposed approach is significantly more accurate: in our experiments, based on a self-created dataset of road layouts, it achieves a max deviation below 0.15 m and an overall RMSE less than 0.01 m, against the respective values of 1.7 m and 0.35 m for a popular approach based on Voronoi tessellation, and 1 m and 0.25 m for an alternative approach based on distance transform.