Improving Image Classification using Domain Adaptation for Autonomous Driving : A Master Thesis in Collaboration with Scania

Abstract: Autonomous driving is a rapidly changing industry and has recently become a heavily focused research topic for vehicle producing companies and research organizations. These autonomous vehicles are typically equipped with sensors such as Light Detection and Radar (LiDAR) in order to perceive their surroundings. The problem of detecting and classifying surrounding objects from the sensor data can be solved using different types of algorithms. Recently, machine learning solutions have been investigated. One problem with the machine learning approach is that the models usually require a substantial amount of labeled data, and labeling LiDAR data is a time-consuming process. A promising solution to this problem is utilizing Domain Adaptation (DA) methods. The DA methods can use labeled camera data, which are easier to label, in conjunction with unlabeled LiDAR data to improve the performance of machine learning models on LiDAR data. This thesis investigates and compares different DA methods that can be used for classification of LiDAR data. In this thesis, two image classification datasets with data of humans and vehicles were created. One dataset contains camera images, and the other dataset contains LiDAR intensity images. The datasets were used to train and test three methods: (1) a baseline method, which simply uses labeled camera images to train a model. (2) Correlation Alignment (CORAL), a DA method that aligns the covariance of camera features towards LiDAR features. (3) Deep Adaptation Network (DAN), a DA method that includes a maximum mean discrepancy computation between camera and LiDAR features within the objective function of the model. These methods were then evaluated based on the resulting confusion matrices, accuracy, recall, precision and F1-score on LiDAR data. The results showed that DAN was the best out of the three methods, reaching an accuracy of 87% while the baseline and CORAL only measured at 65% and 73%, respectively. The strong performance of DAN showed that there is potential for using DA methods within the field of autonomous vehicles.