Exploring Credibility Scoring Metrics of Perception Systems for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effectiveness of various scoring metrics for real-time evaluation of perception system reliability in autonomous vehicles, aiming to enhance safety by early detection of perception failures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of online and offline credibility metrics for perception algorithms under realistic conditions, guiding better design of safety-critical evaluation tools.

Findings

Offline metrics can account for real-world corruptions

Certain metrics show promise as online failure indicators

Insights support development of safer perception systems

Abstract

Autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles' perception algorithms can encounter situations with erroneous object detection, such as misclassification of objects on the road, which can lead to safety violations and potentially fatal consequences. While there has been substantial work in the robustness of object detection algorithms and online metric learning, there is little research on benchmarking scoring metrics to determine any possible indicators of potential misclassification. An emphasis is put on exploring the potential of taking these scoring metrics online in order to allow the AV to make perception-based decisions given real-time constraints. In this work, we explore which, if any, metrics act as online indicators of when perception algorithms and object detectors are failing. Our work provides insight on better design principles and characteristics of online metrics to accurately evaluate the credibility of object detectors. Our approach employs non-adversarial and realistic perturbations to images, on which we evaluate various quantitative metrics. We found that offline metrics can be designed to account for real-world corruptions such as poor weather conditions and that the analysis of such metrics can provide a segue into designing online metrics. This is a clear next step as it can allow for error-free autonomous vehicle perception and safer time-critical and safety-critical decision-making.