Real-Time Semantic Understanding and Segmentation of Urban Scenes for Vehicle Visual Sensors by Optimized DCNN Algorithm

Abstract

The modern urban environment is becoming more and more complex. In helping us identify surrounding objects, vehicle vision sensors rely more on the semantic segmentation ability of deep learning networks. The performance of a semantic segmentation network is essential. This factor will directly affect the comprehensive level of driving assistance technology in road environment perception. However, the existing semantic segmentation network has a redundant structure, many parameters, and low operational efficiency. Therefore, to reduce the complexity of the network and reduce the number of parameters to improve the network efficiency, based on the deep learning (DL) theory, a method for efficient image semantic segmentation using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is deeply studied. First, the theoretical basis of the convolutional neural network (CNN) is briefly introduced, and the real-time semantic segmentation technology of urban scenes based on DCNN is recommended in detail. Second, the atrous convolution algorithm and the multi-scale parallel atrous spatial pyramid model are introduced. On the basis of this, an Efficient Symmetric Network (ESNet) of real-time semantic segmentation model for autonomous driving scenarios is proposed. The experimental results show that: (1) On the Cityscapes dataset, the ESNet structure achieves 70.7% segmentation accuracy for the 19 semantic categories set, and 87.4% for the seven large grouping categories. Compared with other algorithms, the accuracy has increased to varying degrees. (2) On the CamVid dataset, compared with segmentation networks of multiple lightweight real-time images, the parameters of the ESNet model are around 1.2 m, the highest FPS value is around 90 Hz, and the highest mIOU value is around 70%. In seven semantic categories, the segmentation accuracy of the ESNet model is the highest at around 98%. From this, we found that the ESNet significantly improves segmentation accuracy while maintaining faster forward inference speed. Overall, the research not only provides technical support for the development of real-time semantic understanding and segmentation of DCNN algorithms but also contributes to the development of artificial intelligence technology.