Implementation of a Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Algorithm in Road Obstacle Detection

Due to deep learning’s accurate cognition of the street environment, the convolutional neural network has achieved dramatic development in the application of street scenes. Considering the needs of autonomous driving and assisted driving, in a general way, computer vision technology is used to find obstacles to avoid collisions, which has made semantic segmentation a research priority in recent years. However, semantic segmentation has been constantly facing new challenges for quite a long time. Complex network depth information, large datasets, real-time requirements, etc., are typical problems that need to be solved urgently in the realization of autonomous driving technology. In order to address these problems, we propose an improved lightweight real-time semantic segmentation network, which is based on an efficient image cascading network (ICNet) architecture, using multi-scale branches and a cascaded feature fusion unit to extract rich multi-level features. In this paper, a spatial information network is designed to transmit more prior knowledge of spatial location and edge information. During the course of the training phase, we append an external loss function to enhance the learning process of the deep learning network system as well. This lightweight network can quickly perceive obstacles and detect roads in the drivable area from images to satisfy autonomous driving characteristics. The proposed model shows substantial performance on the Cityscapes dataset. With the premise of ensuring real-time performance, several sets of experimental comparisons illustrate that SP-ICNet enhances the accuracy of road obstacle detection and provides nearly ideal prediction outputs. Compared to the current popular semantic segmentation network, this study also demonstrates the effectiveness of our lightweight network for road obstacle detection in autonomous driving.