Dataset Information

Lightweight Object Detection Ensemble Framework for Autonomous Vehicles in Challenging Weather Conditions

ABSTRACT: The computer vision systems driving autonomous vehicles are judged by their ability to detect objects and obstacles in the vicinity of the vehicle in diverse environments. Enhancing this ability of a self-driving car to distinguish between the elements of its environment under adverse conditions is an important challenge in computer vision. For example, poor weather conditions like fog and rain lead to image corruption which can cause a drastic drop in object detection (OD) performance. The primary navigation of autonomous vehicles depends on the effectiveness of the image processing techniques applied to the data collected from various visual sensors. Therefore, it is essential to develop the capability to detect objects like vehicles and pedestrians under challenging conditions such as like unpleasant weather. Ensembling multiple baseline deep learning models under different voting strategies for object detection and utilizing data augmentation to boost the models' performance is proposed to solve this problem. The data augmentation technique is particularly useful and works with limited training data for OD applications. Furthermore, using the baseline models significantly speeds up the OD process as compared to the custom models due to transfer learning. Therefore, the ensembling approach can be highly effective in resource-constrained devices deployed for autonomous vehicles in uncertain weather conditions. The applied techniques demonstrated an increase in accuracy over the baseline models and were able to identify objects from the images captured in the adverse foggy and rainy weather conditions. The applied techniques demonstrated an increase in accuracy over the baseline models and reached 32.75% mean average precision (mAP) and 52.56% average precision (AP) in detecting cars in the adverse fog and rain weather conditions present in the dataset. The effectiveness of multiple voting strategies for bounding box predictions on the dataset is also demonstrated. These strategies help increase the explainability of object detection in autonomous systems and improve the performance of the ensemble techniques over the baseline models.

SUBMITTER: Walambe R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8516532 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:Object detection based on deep learning has made great progress in the past decade and has been widely used in various fields of daily life. Model lightweighting is the core of deploying target detection models on mobile or edge devices. Lightweight models have fewer parameters and lower computational costs, but are often accompanied by lower detection accuracy. Based on YOLOv5s, this article proposes an improved lightweight target detection model, which can achieve higher detection accuracy with smaller parameters. Firstly, utilizing the lightweight feature of the Ghost module, we integrated it into the C3 structure and replaced some of the C3 modules after the upsample layer on the neck network, thereby reducing the number of model parameters and expediting the model's inference process. Secondly, the coordinate attention (CA) mechanism was added to the neck to enhance the model's ability to pay attention to relevant information and improved detection accuracy. Finally, a more efficient Simplified Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast (SimSPPF) module was designed to enhance the stability of the model and shorten the training time of the model. In order to verify the effectiveness of the improved model, experiments were conducted using three datasets with different features. Experimental results show that the number of parameters of our model is significantly reduced by 28% compared with the original model, and mean average precision (mAP) is increased by 3.1%, 1.1% and 1.8% respectively. The model also performs better in terms of accuracy compared to existing lightweight state-of-the-art models. On three datasets with different features, mAP of the proposed model achieved 87.2%, 77.8% and 92.3%, which is better than YOLOv7tiny (81.4%, 77.7%, 90.3%), YOLOv8n (84.7%, 77.7%, 90.6%) and other advanced models. When achieving the decreased number of parameters, the improved model can successfully increase mAP, providing great reference for deploying the model on mobile or edge devices.

Dataset Information

Lightweight Object Detection Ensemble Framework for Autonomous Vehicles in Challenging Weather Conditions

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets