CarSpeak

Road Object Detection: A Comparative Study of Deep Learning-Based Algorithms

Automated driving and vehicle safety systems need object detection. It is important that object detection be accurate overall and robust to weather and environmental conditions and run in real-time. As a consequence of this approach, they require image processing algorithms to inspect the contents of images. This article compares the accuracy of five major image processing algorithms: Region-based Fully Convolutional Network (R-FCN), Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (Mask R-CNN), Single Shot Multi-Box Detector (SSD), RetinaNet, and You Only Look Once v4 (YOLOv4). In this comparative analysis, we used a large-scale Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD100K) dataset. Their strengths and limitations are analyzed based on parameters such as accuracy (with/without occlusion and truncation), computation time, precision-recall curve. The comparison is given in this article helpful in understanding the pros and cons of standard deep learning-based algorithms while operating under real-time deployment restrictions. We conclude that the YOLOv4 outperforms accurately in detecting difficult road target objects under complex road scenarios and weather conditions in an identical testing environment.

Demonstrations of Cooperative Perception: Safety and Robustness in Connected and Automated Vehicle Operations

Cooperative perception, or collective perception (CP), is an emerging and promising technology for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). It enables an ITS station (ITS-S) to share its local perception information with others by means of vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication, thereby achieving improved efficiency and safety in road transportation. In this paper, we present our recent progress on the development of a connected and automated vehicle (CAV) and intelligent roadside unit (IRSU). The main contribution of the work lies in investigating and demonstrating the use of CP service within intelligent infrastructure to improve awareness of vulnerable road users (VRU) and thus safety for CAVs in various traffic scenarios. We demonstrate in experiments that a connected vehicle (CV) can “see” a pedestrian around the corners. More importantly, we demonstrate how CAVs can autonomously and safely interact with walking and running pedestrians, relying only on the CP information from the IRSU through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. This is one of the first demonstrations of urban vehicle automation using only CP information. We also address in the paper the handling of collective perception messages (CPMs) received from the IRSU, and passing them through a pipeline of CP information coordinate transformation with uncertainty, multiple road user tracking, and eventually path planning/decision-making within the CAV. The experimental results were obtained with manually driven CV, fully autonomous CAV, and an IRSU retrofitted with vision and laser sensors and a road user tracking system.