Camera-Based Friction Estimation with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Sammanfattning: During recent years, great progress has been made within the field of deep learning, and more specifically, within neural networks. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been especially successful within image processing in tasks such as image classification and object detection. Car manufacturers, amongst other actors, are starting to realize the potential of deep learning and have begun applying it to autonomous driving. This is not a simple task, and many challenges still lie ahead. A sub-problem, that needs to be solved, is a way of automatically determining the road conditions, including the friction. Since many modern cars are equipped with cameras these days, it is only natural to approach this problem with CNNs. This is what has been done in this thesis. First, a data set is gathered which consists of 37,000 labeled road images that are taken through the front window of a car. Second, CNNs are trained on this data set to classify the friction of a given road. Gathering road images and labeling them with the correct friction is a time consuming and difficult process, and requires human supervision. For this reason, experiments are made on a second data set, which consist of 54,000 simulated images. These images are captured from the racing game World Rally Championship 7 and are used in addition to the real images, to investigate what can be gained from this. Experiments conducted during this thesis show that CNNs are a good approach for the problem of estimating the road friction. The limiting factor, however, is the data set. Not only does the data set need to be much bigger, but it also has to include a much wider variety of driving conditions. Friction is a complex property and depends on many variables, and CNNs are only effective on the type of data that they have been trained on. For these reasons, new data has to be gather by actively seeking different driving conditions in order for this approach to be deployable in practice.