Three Udacity students each took different approaches to vehicle detection and tracking — some using deep learning and others using standard computer vision. Here’s what they learned!
Vehicle Detection and Tracking
Ivan has a terrific writeup of how to use deep learning for vehicle detection. He builds a model based on Faster-RCNN, but smaller and faster.
“The main idea is that since there is a binary classification problem (vehicle/non-vehicle), a model could be constructed in such a way that it would have an input size of a small training sample (e.g., 64×64) and a single-feature convolutional layer of 1×1 at the top, which output could be used as a probability value for classification.”
Udacity Self Driving Car Engineering Project 5 — Vehicle Detection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h1iv-9sqys
Martijn uses a HOG and SVM approach to build a vehicle detection pipeline. He encountered some issues with noise and finds a creative solution.
“I was advised do try Hard Negative Mining to train my model more accurate, so I captured multiple images of the shadows / threes and added them to the non car image dataset. (to classify them among the non-car classes instead of the car classes)”
Automatic Vehicle Detection for Self Driving Cars
Priya uses a HOG and SVM approach to vehicle detection. By combining those with a threshold over time, she achieves great performance. She discusses some of the tradeoffs, however.
“Firstly, I am not sure this model would perform well when it is a heavy traffic situations when there are multiple vehicles. You need something with near perfect accuracy to avoid bumping into other cars or to ensure there are no crashes on a crossing. More importantly, the model was slow to run. It took 6–7 minutes to process 1 minute of video. I am not sure this model would work in a real life situation with cars and pedestrians on the road.”
David Silver 