End-to-End Learning of Driving Models with Surround-View Cameras and Route Planners

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive end-to-end driving model utilizing surround-view cameras and route planners, demonstrating improved safety and accuracy in diverse driving scenarios through a new dataset and integrated sensor setup.

Contribution

It presents a novel sensor setup with eight surround-view cameras and route planning integration, along with a new dataset and a driving model that leverages this information for better performance.

Findings

360-degree cameras reduce failure rates in city and intersection driving.

Route planners significantly improve steering angle prediction accuracy.

The combined system enhances safety and robustness in autonomous driving.

Abstract

For human drivers, having rear and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a more complete view of what is happening around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. We investigate the problem in a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In particular, we develop a sensor setup that provides data for a 360-degree view of the area surrounding the vehicle, the driving route to the destination, and low-level driving maneuvers (e.g. steering angle and speed) by human drivers. With such a sensor setup we collect a new driving dataset, covering diverse driving scenarios and varying weather/illumination conditions. Finally, we learn a novel driving model by integrating information from the surround-view cameras and the route planner. Two route planners are exploited: 1) by representing the planned routes on OpenStreetMap as a stack of GPS coordinates, and 2) by rendering the planned routes on TomTom Go Mobile and recording the progression into a video. Our experiments show that: 1) 360-degree surround-view cameras help avoid failures made with a single front-view camera, in particular for city driving and intersection scenarios; and 2) route planners help the driving task significantly, especially for steering angle prediction.