Enhancing the Safety of Autonomous Vehicles in Adverse Weather by Deep Learning-Based Object Detection

Recognizing and categorizing items in weather-adverse environments poses significant challenges for autonomous vehicles. To improve the robustness of object-detection systems, this paper introduces an innovative approach for detecting objects at different levels by leveraging sensors and deep learning-based solutions within a traffic circle. The suggested approach improves the effectiveness of single-stage object detectors, aiming to advance the performance in perceiving autonomous racing environments and minimizing instances of false detection and low recognition rates. The improved framework is based on the one-stage object-detection model, incorporating multiple lightweight backbones. Additionally, attention mechanisms are integrated to refine the object-detection process further. Our proposed model demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art method on the DAWN dataset, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 99.1%, surpassing the previous result of 84.7%.