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This paper presents an all-weather drivable area detection method based on deep learning, addressing the challenges of recognizing unstructured roads and achieving clear environmental perception under adverse weather conditions in current autonomous driving systems. The method enhances the Lite-Mobilenetv2 feature extraction module and integrates a pyramid pooling module with an attention mechanism. Moreover, it introduces a defogging preprocessing module suitable for real-time detection, which transforms foggy images into clear ones for accurate drivable area detection. The experiments adopt a transfer learning-based training approach, training an all-road-condition semantic segmentation model on four datasets that include both structured and unstructured roads, with and without fog. This strategy reduces computational load and enhances detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate a 3.84% efficiency improvement compared to existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, 3D object detection based on LiDAR point clouds is a key component of autonomous driving. In pursuit of enhancing the accuracy of 3D point cloud feature extraction and point cloud detection, this paper introduces a novel 3D object detection model, termed as Graph Self-Attention-RCNN (GA-RCNN). This model is designed to integrate voxel information and point location information, enhancing the quality of 3D object proposals while maintaining contextual accuracy. The first stage rectifies the previous approach that relied on local features for preselected boxes, overlooking crucial global contextual information. An improved method is suggested in this work, utilizing BEV to capture long-range dependencies via a cross-attention mechanism. The second stage addresses the overreliance on local neighborhood point feature extraction. The Graph Self-Attention Pooling method is proposed, characterized by its dynamic computation of contribution weights for inputs. This enhances the model's flexibility and generalization performance. Extensive evaluations on KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate GA-RCNN's superior accuracy compared to other methods, affirming its efficacy in 3D object detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The upsurge of autonomous vehicles in the automobile industry will lead to better driving experiences while also enabling the users to solve challenging navigation problems. Reaching such capabilities will require significant technological attention and the flawless execution of various complex tasks, one of which is ensuring robust localization and mapping. Recent surveys have not provided a meaningful and comprehensive description of the current approaches in this field. Accordingly, this review is intended to provide adequate coverage of the problems affecting autonomous vehicles in this area, by examining the most recent methods for mapping and localization as well as related feature extraction and data security problems. First, a discussion of the contemporary methods of extracting relevant features from equipped sensors and their categorization as semantic, non-semantic, and deep learning methods is presented. We conclude that representativeness, low cost, and accessibility are crucial constraints in the choice of the methods to be adopted for localization and mapping tasks. Second, the survey focuses on methods to build a vehicle's environment map, considering both the commercial and the academic solutions available. The analysis proposes a difference between two types of environment, known and unknown, and develops solutions in each case. Third, the survey explores different approaches to vehicle localization and also classifies them according to their mathematical characteristics and priorities. Each section concludes by presenting the related challenges and some future directions. The article also highlights the security problems likely to be encountered in self-driving vehicles, with an assessment of possible defense mechanisms that could prevent security attacks in vehicles. Finally, the article ends with a debate on the potential impacts of autonomous driving, spanning energy consumption and emission reduction, sound and light pollution, integration into smart cities, infrastructure optimization, and software refinement. This thorough investigation aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of the diverse implications of autonomous driving across various domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective lane detection technology plays an important role in the current autonomous driving system. Although deep learning models, with their intricate network designs, have proven highly capable of detecting lanes, there persist key areas requiring attention. Firstly, the symmetry inherent in visuals captured by forward-facing automotive cameras is an underexploited resource. Secondly, the vast potential of position information remains untapped, which can undermine detection precision. In response to these challenges, we propose FF-HPINet, a novel approach for lane detection. We introduce the Flipped Feature Extraction module, which models pixel pairwise relationships between the flipped feature and the original feature. This module allows us to capture symmetrical features and obtain high-level semantic feature maps from different receptive fields. Additionally, we design the Hierarchical Position Information Extraction module to meticulously mine the position information of the lanes, vastly improving target identification accuracy. Furthermore, the Deformable Context Extraction module is proposed to distill vital foreground elements and contextual nuances from the surrounding environment, yielding focused and contextually apt feature representations. Our approach achieves excellent performance with the F1 score of 97.00% on the TuSimple dataset and 76.84% on the CULane dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limitations are identified in the expressive capabilities of the deep feature extraction network employed in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), particularly in complex scenarios. Additionally, learning performance is negatively impacted by compound errors, with consideration given to the potential critical role of sample quality in learning outcomes. Therefore, how to improve the collision avoidance decision-making adaptive and effectiveness for autonomous ships navigating in various scenarios is crucial. To address these issues and overcome data acquisition difficulties, a method called rule-guided vision supervised learning (RGVSL) is proposed in this paper. Through a static collision avoidance decision-making task, a comparison is drawn between a deep feature extraction network and the Nature CNN in DQN, revealing shortcomings in the feature extraction of DRL. Additionally, a collision avoidance decision-making environment with the capability of generalization for maritime encounters is proposed, and the advantages of the method in terms of adaptability and learning cost are validated. Finally, it is demonstrated that the RGVSL method is equivalent to a DQN with γ set to 0, indicating a significant performance improvement without compound errors. Achieving an adaptive decision accuracy of over 90% in various encounter scenarios without retraining, this research substantially reduces learning costs. It can provide innovative and practical solutions for the technological development in the field of autonomous ship collision avoidance decision-making. • Revolutionizes DRL data by using explicit rules for diverse scenarios, boosting model performance. • Exposes Nature CNN's DQN inadequacy, emphasizing the need for effective feature expression in DRL. • RGVSL achieves 90% accuracy in diverse maritime scenarios, cutting retraining costs, enhancing performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

6DoF camera localization is an important component of autonomous driving and navigation. Deep learning has achieved impressive results in localization, but its robustness in dynamic environments has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose a framework based on hybrid attention mechanism which can be generally applied to existing CNN-based pose regressors to improve their robustness in dynamic environments. Specifically, we propose a novel Transformer Bottleneck (TBo) block including convolution, channel attention, and a position-aware self-attention mechanism, which extracts more geometrically robust features by capturing the corresponding long-term dependencies between pixels. Furthermore, we introduce shuffle attention (SA) before the pose regressor, which integrates feature information in both spatial and channel dimensions, forcing the network to learn geometrically robust features, reducing the effects of dynamic objects and illumination conditions to improve camera localization accuracy. We evaluate our method on commonly benchmarked indoor and outdoor datasets and the experimental results show that our proposed method can significantly improve localization performance compared compare favorably to contemporary pose regressors schemes. In addition, extensive ablation evaluations are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid attention bottleneck block for pose regression networks. • We propose a novel Transformer Bottleneck block with self-attention and channel attention to overcome the limitations of convolution. This coupling allows them to be optimized in a mutually reinforcing manner, significantly improving fine-grained feature extraction for accurate localization. • We propose a novel end-to-end hybrid attention network for single image localization, which improves the accuracy and robustness of camera localization, especially in dynamic scenes. • We conduct extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor dataset, which shows that our model performs better than the existing competitive methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of intelligent connected vehicles, the precise and real-time identification of speed bumps is critically important for the safety of autonomous driving. To address the issue that existing visual perception algorithms struggle to simultaneously maintain identification accuracy and real-time performance amidst image distortion and complex environmental conditions, this study proposes an enhanced lightweight neural network framework, YOLOv5-FPNet. This framework strengthens perception capabilities in two key phases: feature extraction and loss constraint. Firstly, FPNet, based on FasterNet and Dynamic Snake Convolution, is developed to adaptively extract structural features of distorted speed bumps with accuracy. Subsequently, the C3-SFC module is proposed to augment the adaptability of the neck and head components to distorted features. Furthermore, the SimAM attention mechanism is embedded within the backbone to enhance the ability of key feature extraction. Finally, an adaptive loss function, Inner–WiseIoU, based on a dynamic non-monotonic focusing mechanism, is designed to improve the generalization and fitting ability of bounding boxes. Experimental evaluations on a custom speed bumps dataset demonstrate the superior performance of FPNet, with significant improvements in key metrics such as the mAP, mAP50_95, and FPS by 38.76%, 143.15%, and 51.23%, respectively, compared to conventional lightweight neural networks. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the proposed improvements. This research provides a fast and accurate speed bump detection solution for autonomous vehicles, offering theoretical insights for obstacle recognition in intelligent vehicle systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autonomous vehicles, the LiDAR and radar sensors are indispensable components for measuring distances to objects. While deep-learning-based algorithms for LiDAR sensors have been extensively proposed, the same cannot be said for radar sensors. LiDAR and radar share the commonality of measuring distances, but they are used in different environments. LiDAR tends to produce less noisy data and provides precise distance measurements, but it is highly affected by environmental factors like rain and fog. In contrast, radar is less impacted by environmental conditions but tends to generate noisier data. To reduce noise in radar data and enhance radar data augmentation, we propose a LiDAR-to-Radar translation method with a voxel feature extraction module, leveraging the fact that both sensors acquire data in a point-based manner. Because of the translation of high-quality LiDAR data into radar data, this becomes achievable. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method by acquiring and using data from both LiDAR and radar sensors in the same environment for validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]