Dual-Task Real-Time Low-Light Lane and Pothole Detection for Resource-Constrained Environments

Abstract

Lane detection and road hazard awareness are crucial for ensuring safety in autonomous driving and Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). These systems rely heavily on clear visual cues, which are often compromised in low- light driving scenarios. The challenge is especially pronounced in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where poorly illuminated roads, faded lane markings, and unmaintained sur- faces frequently co-occur. Under such conditions, conventional single-model detectors trained for daytime environments degrade sharply, as lane cues and pothole textures often compete in the same field of view. To address this, we present a lightweight dual- model pipeline that integrates a low-light enhancement front end with an OpenCV-based lane delineation pipeline and a YOLOv12 detector for pothole localization. The models run in parallel on shared inputs, and their outputs are fused to generate a unified lane geometry and hazard map in a single pass. The architecture is optimized for modest compute and memory budgets, enabling deployment in resource-constrained settings while maintaining high throughput. Evaluated on evening-time urban road scenes from Bangladesh, achieves 88.7potholes and 89.3FPS on NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti, outperforming a single-detector baseline. These results highlight the potential of our approach for practical, real-time ADAS perception in underserved regions. Index Terms—Low-light imaging, Lane detection, Pothole de- tection, YOLOv12, OpenCV, Image enhancement, Edge comput- ing, Autonomous driving