Occlusion-free road segmentation leveraging semantics for autonomous vehicles

The deep convolutional neural network has led the trend of vision-based road detection, however, obtaining a full road area despite the occlusion from monocular vision remains challenging due to the dynamic scenes in autonomous driving. Inferring the occluded road area requires a comprehensive understanding of the geometry and the semantics of the visible scene. To this end, we create a small but effective dataset based on the KITTI dataset named KITTI-OFRS (KITTI-occlusion-free road segmentation) dataset and propose a lightweight and efficient, fully convolutional neural network called OFRSNet (occlusion-free road segmentation network) that learns to predict occluded portions of the road in the semantic domain by looking around foreground objects and visible road layout. In particular, the global context module is used to build up the down-sampling and joint context up-sampling block in our network, which promotes the performance of the network. Moreover, a spatially-weighted cross-entropy loss is designed to significantly increases the accuracy of this task. Extensive experiments on different datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and comparisons with current excellent methods show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline models by obtaining a better trade-off between accuracy and runtime, which makes our approach is able to be applied to autonomous vehicles in real-time.Published versio