Comparison and performance analysis of deep learning techniques for pedestrian detection in self-driving vehicles

Background: Self-driving cars, also known as automated cars are a form of vehicle that can move without a driver or human involvement to control it. They employ numerous pieces of equipment to forecast the car’s navigation, and the car’s path is determined depending on the output of these devices. There are numerous methods available to anticipate the path of self-driving cars. Pedestrian detection is critical for autonomous cars to avoid fatalities and accidents caused by self-driving cars. Objectives: In this research, we focus on the algorithms in machine learning and deep learning to detect pedestrians on the roads. Also, to calculate the most accurate algorithm that can be used in pedestrian detection in automated cars by performing a literature review to select the algorithms. Methods: The methodologies we use are literature review and experimentation, literature review can help us to find efficient algorithms for pedestrian detection in terms of accuracy, computational complexity, etc. After performing the literature review we selected the most efficient algorithms for evaluation and comparison. The second methodology includes experimentation as it evaluates these algorithms under different conditions and scenarios. Through experimentation, we can monitor the different factors that affect the algorithms. Experimentation makes it possible for us to evaluate the algorithms using various metrics such as accuracy and loss which are mainly used to provide a quantitative measure of performance. Results: Based on the literature study, we focused on pedestrian detection deep learning models such as CNN, SSD, and RPN for this thesis project. After evaluating and comparing the algorithms using performance metrics, the outcomes of the experiments demonstrated that RPN was the highest and best-performing algorithm with 95.63% accuracy & loss of 0.0068 followed by SSD with 95.29% accuracy & loss of 0.0142 and CNN with 70.84% accuracy & loss of 0.0622. Conclusions: Among the three deep learning models evaluated for pedestrian identification, the CNN, RPN, and SSD, RPN is the most efficient model with the best performance based on the metrics assessed