CenterPNets: A Multi-Task Shared Network for Traffic Perception

The importance of panoramic traffic perception tasks in autonomous driving is increasing, so shared networks with high accuracy are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a multi-task shared sensing network, called CenterPNets, that can perform the three major detection tasks of target detection, driving area segmentation, and lane detection in traffic sensing in one go and propose several key optimizations to improve the overall detection performance. First, this paper proposes an efficient detection head and segmentation head based on a shared path aggregation network to improve the overall reuse rate of CenterPNets and an efficient multi-task joint training loss function to optimize the model. Secondly, the detection head branch uses an anchor-free frame mechanism to automatically regress target location information to improve the inference speed of the model. Finally, the split-head branch fuses deep multi-scale features with shallow fine-grained features, ensuring that the extracted features are rich in detail. CenterPNets achieves an average detection accuracy of 75.8% on the publicly available large-scale Berkeley DeepDrive dataset, with an intersection ratio of 92.8% and 32.1% for driveableareas and lane areas, respectively. Therefore, CenterPNets is a precise and effective solution to the multi-tasking detection issue.