Drivable Area Detection Using Deep Learning Models for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Drivable area or free space detection is an important task in Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving system. It can help intelligent vehicles understand road conditions and determine safe driving area. Semantic segmentation is a pixel-wise prediction which can classify each pixel into its category. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based semantic segmentation architecture to predict the drivable area in front of the vehicle. Our model is built based on ResNet backbone with the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) modules. The backbone in the bottom-up architecture extracts features and an ASPP is attached to the last decoder layer. Additionally, a top-down architecture with lateral connections is added in the decoder and the FPN utilizes the multi-scale features for final prediction. Our model is evaluated on the Cityscapes street scene dataset and achieves 95.90% mIoU on road segmentation. Next, the model is evaluated on the BDD100K large-scale diverse driving dataset with direct drivable region and alternative drivable region annotations. For this dataset our model achieves 84.58% mIoU which is comparable to some State-of-the-Art models.