Learning Driving Models with a Surround-View Camera System and a Route Planner

03/27/2018
by   Simon Hecker, et al.
0

For people, having a rear-view mirror and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a better view of what happens around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. Hence, we investigate the problem with a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In particular, we develop a sensor setup that provides data for a 360-degree view of the area surrounding the vehicle, the driving route to the destination, and the low-level driving maneuvers (e.g. steering angle and speed) by human drivers. With such sensor setup we collect a new driving dataset, covering diverse driving scenarios and varying weather/illumination conditions. Finally, we learn a novel driving model by integrating information from the surround-view cameras and the route planner. Two route planners are exploited: one based on OpenStreetMap and the other on TomTom Maps. The route planners are exploited in two ways: 1) by representing the planned routes as a stack of GPS coordinates, and 2) by rendering the planned routes on a map and recording the progression into a video. Our experiments show that: 1) 360-degree surround-view cameras help avoid failures made with a single front-view camera for the driving task; and 2) a route planner helps the driving task significantly. We acknowledge that our method is not the best-ever driving model, but that is not our focus. Rather, it provides a strong basis for further academic research, especially on driving relevant tasks by integrating information from street-view images and the planned driving routes. Code and data will be made available.

READ FULL TEXT

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset