Segmentation and Depth Estimation of Urban Road Using Monocular Camera and Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Deep learning for safe autonomous transport is rapidly emerging. Fast and robust perception for autonomous vehicles will be crucial for future navigation in urban areas with high traffic and human interplay. Previous work focuses on extracting full image depth maps, or finding specific road features such as lanes. However, in urban environments lanes are not always present, and sensors such as LiDAR with 3D point clouds provide a quite sparse depth perception of road with demanding algorithmic approaches. In this thesis we derive a novel convolutional neural network that we call AutoNet. It is designed as an encoder-decoder network for pixel-wise depth estimation of an urban drivable free-space road, using only a monocular camera, and handled as a supervised regression problem. AutoNet is also constructed as a classification network to solely classify and segment the drivable free-space in real- time with monocular vision, handled as a supervised classification problem, which shows to be a simpler and more robust solution than the regression approach. We also implement the state of the art neural network ENet for comparison, which is designed for fast real-time semantic segmentation and fast inference speed. The evaluation shows that AutoNet outperforms ENet for every performance metrics, but shows to be slower in terms of frame rate. However, optimization techniques are proposed for future work, on how to advance the frame rate of the network while still maintaining the robustness and performance. All the training and evaluation is done on the Cityscapes dataset. New ground truth labels for road depth perception are created for training with a novel approach of fusing pre-computed depth maps with semantic labels. Data collection with a Scania vehicle is conducted, mounted with a monocular camera to test the final derived models. The proposed AutoNet shows promising state of the art performance in regards to road depth estimation as well as road classification.