• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.91-99
• /
• 2024

Collision avoidance system is important to improve the robustness and functional safety of autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes an object-level distance estimation method to develop a collision avoidance system, and it is applied to golfcarts utilized in country club environments. To improve the detection accuracy, we continually trained an object detection model based on pseudo labels generated by a pre-trained detector. Moreover, we propose object-aware depth estimation (OADE) method which trains a depth model focusing on object regions. In the OADE algorithm, we generated dense depth information for object regions by utilizing detection results and sparse LiDAR points, and it is referred to as object-aware LiDAR projection (OALP). By using the OALP maps, a depth estimation model was trained by backpropagating more gradients of the loss on object regions. Experiments were conducted on our custom dataset, which was collected for the travel distance of 22 km on 54 holes in three country clubs under various weather conditions. The precision and recall rate were respectively improved from 70.5% and 49.1% to 95.3% and 92.1% after the continual learning with pseudo labels. Moreover, the OADE algorithm reduces the absolute relative error from 4.76% to 4.27% for estimating distances to obstacles.