A Study on Development of the Camera-Based Blind Spot Detection System Using the Deep Learning Methodology

One of the recent news headlines is that a pedestrian was killed by an autonomous vehicle because safety features in this vehicle did not detect an object on a road correctly. Due to this accident, some global automobile companies announced plans to postpone development of an autonomous vehicle. Furthermore, there is no doubt about the importance of safety features for autonomous vehicles. For this reason, our research goal is the development of a very safe and lightweight camera-based blind spot detection system, which can be applied to future autonomous vehicles. The blind spot detection system was implemented in open source software. Approximately 2000 vehicle images and 9000 non-vehicle images were adopted for training the Fully Connected Network (FCN) model. Other data processing concepts such as the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), heat map, and thresholding were also employed. We achieved 99.43% training accuracy and 98.99% testing accuracy of the FCN model, respectively. Source codes with respect to all the methodologies were then deployed to an off-the-shelf embedded board for actual testing on a road. Actual testing was conducted with consideration of various factors, and we confirmed 93.75% average detection accuracy with three false positives.