Find Your Own Way: Weakly-Supervised Segmentation of Path Proposals for Urban Autonomy

Dan Barnes1, Will Maddern1, Ingmar Posner2

  • 1University of Oxford
  • 2Oxford University

Details

10:00 - 10:05 | Tue 30 May | Room 4411/4412 | TUA4.2

Session: ITS perception & planning

Abstract

We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or lane markings. We evaluate our method on the large-scale KITTI and Oxford RobotCar datasets and demonstrate reliable path proposal and obstacle segmentation in a wide variety of environments under a range of lighting, weather and traffic conditions. We illustrate how the method can generalise to multiple path proposals at intersections and outline plans to incorporate the system into a framework for autonomous urban driving.