A Quality Index Metric and Method for Online Self-Assessment of Autonomous Vehicles Sensory Perception
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Perception is critical to autonomous driving safety. Camera-based object detection is one of the most important methods for autonomous vehicle perception. Current camera-based object detection solutions for autonomous driving cannot provide feedback on the detection performance for each frame. We propose an evaluation metric, namely the perception quality index (PQI), to assess the camera-based object detection algorithm performance and provide the perception quality feedback frame by frame. The method of the PQI generation is by combining the fine-grained saliency map intensity with the object detection algorithm's output results. Furthermore, we developed a superpixel-based attention network (SPA-NET) to predict the proposed PQI evaluation metric by using raw image pixels and superpixels as input. The proposed evaluation metric and prediction network are tested on three open-source datasets. The proposed evaluation metric can correctly assess the camera-based perception quality under the autonomous driving environment according to the experiment results. The network regression R-square values determine the comparison among models. It is shown that a Perception Quality Index is useful in self-evaluating a cameras visual scene perception.
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