Centralised and Decentralised Sensor Fusion-Based Emergency Brake Assist

Many advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are currently trying to utilise multi-sensor architectures, where the driver assistance algorithm receives data from a multitude of sensors. As mono-sensor systems cannot provide reliable and consistent readings under all circumstances because of errors and other limitations, fusing data from multiple sensors ensures that the environmental parameters are perceived correctly and reliably for most scenarios, thereby substantially improving the reliability of the multi-sensor-based automotive systems. This paper first highlights the significance of efficiently fusing data from multiple sensors in ADAS features. An emergency brake assist (EBA) system is showcased using multiple sensors, namely, a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor and camera. The architectures of the proposed ‘centralised’ and ‘decentralised’ sensor fusion approaches for EBA are discussed along with their constituents, i.e., the detection algorithms, the fusion algorithm, and the tracking algorithm. The centralised and decentralised architectures are built and analytically compared, and the performance of these two fusion architectures for EBA are evaluated in terms of speed of execution, accuracy, and computational cost. While both fusion methods are seen to drive the EBA application at an acceptable frame rate (~20 fps or higher) on an Intel i5-based Ubuntu system, it was concluded through the experiments and analytical comparisons that the decentralised fusion-driven EBA leads to higher accuracy; however, it has the downside of a higher computational cost. The centralised fusion-driven EBA yields comparatively less accurate results, but with the benefits of a higher frame rate and lesser computational cost.