Exploring the Potential of Using Semantic Context and Common Sense in On-Road Vehicle Detection

Vehicle detection is an important research topic for autonomous driving community. Since the great success of deep learning on object detection, almost all vehicle detection methods go along with this line. However, deep learning methods heavily rely on the training data, and the whole mechanism is like a “black box” Therefore, in this paper, we explore a vehicle detection method using traffic semantic context and human common sense instead of relying on the training data. To verify our idea, we compare our method with two classic machine learning methods as well as three state- of-the-art deep learning methods on a dataset collected in real traffics. The results show that our method outperforms others on this dataset. The deep learning methods may exceed ours after enlarging the training data or testing on more complicated datasets. However, the main contribution of this paper is providing inspiration for learning methods, and we believe their performance can be greatly improved after considering the idea of this paper.