A system and method for using triplet loss for proposal free instance-wise semantic segmentation for lane detection are disclosed. A particular embodiment includes: receiving image data from an image generating device mounted on an autonomous vehicle; performing a semantic segmentation operation or other object detection on the received image data to identify and label objects in the image data with object category labels on a per-pixel basis and producing corresponding semantic segmentation prediction data; performing a triplet loss calculation operation using the semantic segmentation prediction data to identify different instances of objects with similar object category labels found in the image data; and determining an appropriate vehicle control action for the autonomous vehicle based on the different instances of objects identified in the image data.