Self-Supervised Learning of the Drivable Area for Autonomous Vehicles

We propose a new approach for generating training data for the task of drivable area segmentation with deep neural networks (DNN). The impressive progress of deep learning in recent years demonstrated a superior performance of DNNs over traditional machine learning and deterministic algorithms for various tasks. Nevertheless, the acquisition of large-scale datasets with associated ground truth labels still poses an expensive and labor-intensive problem. We contribute to the solution of this problem for the task of road segmentation by proposing an automatic labeling pipeline which leverages a deterministic stereo-based approach for ground plane detection to create large datasets suitable for training neural networks. Based on the popular Cityscapes [1] and KITTI dataset [2] and two off-the-shelf DNNs for semantic segmentation, we show that we can achieve good segmentation results on monocular images, which substantially exceed the performance of the algorithm employed for automatic labeling without the need of any manual annotation.