Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Model Evaluation, Dataset Generation, Perspective Comparison, and Real-Time Capability

Abstract

Environmental perception is an important aspect within the field of autonomous vehicles that provides crucial information about the driving domain, including but not limited to identifying clear driving areas and surrounding obstacles. Semantic segmentation is a widely used perception method for self-driving cars that associates each pixel of an image with a predefined class. In this context, several segmentation models are evaluated regarding accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results on the generated dataset confirm that the segmentation model FasterSeg is fast enough to be used in realtime on lowpower computational (embedded) devices in self-driving cars. A simple method is also introduced to generate synthetic training data for the model. Moreover, the accuracy of the first-person perspective and the bird's eye view perspective are compared. For a 320 × 256 input in the first-person perspective, FasterSeg achieves 65.44 % mean Intersection over Union (mIoU), and for a 320×256 input from the bird's eye view perspective, FasterSeg achieves 64.08 % mIoU. Both perspectives achieve a frame rate of 247.11 Frames per Second (FPS) on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier. Lastly, the frame rate and the accuracy with respect to the arithmetic 16-bit Floating Point (FP16) and 32-bit Floating Point (FP32) of both perspectives are measured and compared on the target hardware.