Deep Learning-Based Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

Perception is a fundamental task of autonomous driving systems, which gathers all the necessary information about the surrounding environment of the moving vehicle. Then a decision-making system takes the perception data as input and provides the optimum decision given a scenario, which maximizes the safety of the passengers. In this project, we have developed variants of the U-Net model to perform semantic segmentation on urban scene images to understand the surroundings of an autonomous vehicle. The U-Net model and its variants are adopted for semantic segmentation in this project to account for the power of the U-Net in handling large and small datasets. We have also compared the best-performing variant with other commonly used semantic segmentation models. The comparative analysis was performed using three well-known models, including FCN-16, FCN-8, and SegNet. After conducting sensitivity and comparative analysis, it is concluded that the U-Net variants performed the best in terms of the Intersection over Union (IoU) evaluation metric and other quality metrics.