When incorporating deep neural networks into robotic systems, a major challenge is the lack of uncertainty measures associated with their output predictions. Methods for uncertainty estimation in the output of deep object detectors (DNNs) have been proposed in recent works, but have had limited success due to 1) information loss at the detectors nonmaximum suppression (NMS) stage, and 2) failure to take into account the multitask, many-to-one nature of anchorbased object detection. To that end, we introduce BayesOD, an uncertainty estimation approach that reformulates the standard object detector inference and Non-Maximum suppression components from a Bayesian perspective. Experiments performed on four common object detection datasets show that BayesOD provides uncertainty estimates that are better correlated with the accuracy of detections, manifesting as a significant reduction of 9.77%-13.13% on the minimum Gaussian uncertainty error metric and a reduction of 1.63%-5.23% on the minimum Categorical uncertainty error metric. Code will be released at https://github.com/asharakeh/bayes-od-rc.
The Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions (CADC) dataset was collected with the Autonomoose autonomous vehicle platform, based on a modified Lincoln MKZ. The dataset, collected during winter within the Region of Waterloo, Canada, is the first autonomous driving dataset that focuses on adverse driving conditions specifically. It contains 7,000 frames of annotated data from 8 cameras (Ximea MQ013CG-E2), lidar (VLP-32C), and a GNSS+INS system (Novatel OEM638), collected through a variety of winter weather conditions. The sensors are time synchronized and calibrated with the intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations included in the dataset. Lidar frame annotations that represent ground truth for 3D object detection and tracking have been provided by Scale AI.
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