Project description
Making safer autonomous vehicles a reality
Autonomous road vehicles have finally made their way into everyday life. While being an important step towards the future, autonomous vehicles also present several challenges. Chief among these is ensuring absolute safety on public roads. State-of-the-art autonomous vehicles still suffer from poor object detection and false alarms. Often the response is higher resolution and higher cost sensors that can’t always address issues inherent in common object detection systems. The EU-funded STV project will develop a novel object detection solution based on a groundbreaking new architecture. The goal is to optimise low-cost sensors, improve detection rates, reduce false alarms and make affordable, safe autonomous vehicles a reality.
Objective
The automotive industry is amid a disruptive change highlighted by the entry of autonomous vehicles. However, at current stage,
self-driving cars technologies are not safe enough for operation on public roads. They suffer from too many missed detections and
high false alarm rates. Some autonomous vehicle developers have tried to overcome these problems by putting higher resolution
(and higher cost) sensors, yet they solutions still these suffer from inadequate perception.
There is a growing market consensus that the limitations of the current perception solutions (called ‘Environmental Models’) are
entrenched in their ‘Object level’ fusion architecture. This cannot be fixed by tweaking the algorithms, changing parameters or
adding more data for learning. A promising alternative solution is ‘Raw data fusion’ with roots in academia and now diffusing to
commercial projects.
VAYAVISION “Seeing the View” project is based on ‘Raw Data Fusion’ architecture with up-sample techniques to further increase the
effective resolution of sparse measurements from active sensors (LiDARs and RADARs). The solution constructs an accurate RGBd 3D
model based even on low cost sensors while enabling the perception algorithms richer data and a more comprehensive view of the
environment. Using Machine Vision algorithms and Deep Neural Networks, VAYAVISION detects very small obstacles (such as a
10cm high box) and has much better detection rates and with less false alarms than the legacy ‘Object Fusion’ solutions.
VAYAVISION’s raw data fusion platform is planned to enable a much safer and comfortable driving experience at an affordable
vehicle price. VAYAVISION solves the heart of autonomous driving challenge of correctly understanding the changing environment
of the vehicle by using ‘Raw Data Fusion’ and Up-sampling.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringautomotive engineeringautonomous vehicles
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer vision
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationsradio technologyradar
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
6037604 OR YEHUDA
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.