2D object detection and semantic segmentation in the Carla simulator

Abstract: The subject of self-driving car technology has drawn growing interest in recent years. Many companies, such as Baidu and Tesla, have already introduced automatic driving techniques in their newest cars when driving in a specific area. However, there are still many challenges ahead toward fully autonomous driving cars. Tesla has caused several severe accidents when using autonomous driving functions, which makes the public doubt self-driving car technology. Therefore, it is necessary to use the simulator environment to help verify and perfect algorithms for the perception, planning, and decision-making of autonomous vehicles before implementation in real-world cars. This project aims to build a benchmark for implementing the whole self-driving car system in software. There are three main components including perception, planning, and control in the entire autonomous driving system. This thesis focuses on two sub-tasks 2D object detection and semantic segmentation in the perception part. All of the experiments will be tested in a simulator environment called The CAR Learning to Act(Carla), which is an open-source platform for autonomous car research. Carla simulator is developed based on the game engine(Unreal4). It has a server-client system, which provides a flexible python API. 2D object detection uses the You only look once(Yolov4) algorithm that contains the tricks of the latest deep learning techniques from the aspect of network structure and data augmentation to strengthen the network’s ability to learn the object. Yolov4 achieves higher accuracy and short inference time when comparing with the other popular object detection algorithms. Semantic segmentation uses Efficient networks for Computer Vision(ESPnetv2). It is a light-weight and power-efficient network, which achieves the same performance as other semantic segmentation algorithms by using fewer network parameters and FLOPS. In this project, Yolov4 and ESPnetv2 are implemented into the Carla simulator. Two modules work together to help the autonomous car understand the world. The minimal distance awareness application is implemented into the Carla simulator to detect the distance to the ahead vehicles. This application can be used as a basic function to avoid the collision. Experiments are tested by using a single Nvidia GPU(RTX2060) in Ubuntu 18.0 system.