Environment Recognition for Electric Wheelchair Based on YOLOv2

Abstract

At present, the aging population is growing in Japan. Along with that, the need for the utilization of welfare equipment is increasing. Electric wheelchair, a convenient transportation tool, is popularized rapidly. However, many accidents have occurred by using electric wheelchair, and the dangers for driving are pointed out. Therefore, it needs to improve accident factors, reduce accidents and improve the convenience of electric wheelchair by automation. Environmental recognition is the key technology for developing autonomous electric wheelchair. Environmental recognition includes self-position estimation, recognition of sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic lights, and moving object prediction, etc. In order to solve these problems, this paper describes a system for the detection of sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic lights. We develop the object recognition methods using a modified YOLOv2 that is one of object detection algorithms applying convolutional neural networks (CNN). We detect the object through YOLOv2 and perform processing such as unnecessary bounding box deletion and interpolation. The experimental results demonstrate that the area under the curve (AUC) of the detection rate is 0.620.