An Analytical Framework to Enhance Autonomous Vehicle Perception for Smart Cities

The driving environment perception has a vital role for autonomous driving and nowadays has been actively explored for its realization. The research community and relevant stakeholders necessitate the development of Deep Learning (DL) models and AI-enabled solutions to enhance autonomous vehicles (AVs) for smart mobility. There is a need to develop a model that accurately perceives multiple objects on the road and predicts the driver's perception to control the car's movements. This article proposes a novel utility-based analytical model that enables perception systems of AVs to understand the driving environment. The article consists of modules: acquiring a custom dataset having distinctive objects, i.e., motorcyclists, rickshaws, etc; a DL-based model (YOLOv8s) for object detection; and a module to measure the utility of perception service from the performance values of trained model instances. The perception model is validated based on the object detection task, and its process is benchmarked by state-of-the-art deep learning models' performance metrics from the nuScense dataset. The experimental results show three best-performing YOLOv8s instances based on mAP@0.5 values, i.e., SGD-based (0.832), Adam-based (0.810), and AdamW-based (0.822). However, the AdamW-based model (i.e., car: 0.921, motorcyclist: 0.899, truck: 0.793, etc.) still outperforms the SGD-based model (i.e., car: 0.915, motorcyclist: 0.892, truck: 0.781, etc.) because it has better class-level performance values, confirmed by the proposed perception model. We validate that the proposed function is capable of finding the right perception for AVs. The results above encourage using the proposed perception model to evaluate the utility of learning models and determine the appropriate perception for AVs.