Object criticality for safer navigation

TL;DR

It is shown that, given an object detector, filtering objects based on their relevance, in combination with the traditional confidence threshold, reduces the risk of missing relevant objects, decreases the likelihood of dangerous trajectories, and improves the quality of trajectories in general.

Abstract

Object detection in autonomous driving consists in perceiving and locating instances of objects in multi-dimensional data, such as images or lidar scans. Very recently, multiple works are proposing to evaluate object detectors by measuring their ability to detect the objects that are most likely to interfere with the driving task. Detectors are then ranked according to their ability to detect the most relevant objects, rather than the highest number of objects. However there is little evidence so far that the relevance of predicted object may contribute to the safety and reliability improvement of the driving task. This position paper elaborates on a strategy, together with partial results, to i) configure and deploy object detectors that successfully extract knowledge on object relevance, and ii) use such knowledge to improve the trajectory planning task. We show that, given an object detector, filtering objects based on their relevance, in combination with the traditional confidence threshold, reduces the risk of missing relevant objects, decreases the likelihood of dangerous trajectories, and improves the quality of trajectories in general.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: BBs generated by the object detector SSN using a sample from Caesar202011618. The optimal confidence threshold 0.33 is defined experimentally.
• Figure 2: a) ground truth BBs; b) BBs predicted by REG; c) we avoid removing BBs with criticality score above 0.8.