A Driving Area Detection Algorithm Based on Swin Transformer

The detection of drivable areas holds immense significance within the perception system of autonomous vehicles. This capability enables intelligent vehicles to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current road conditions and effectively identify safe areas suitable for safe navigation. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved significant progress in the application of drivable areas detection, particularly in semantic segmentation. However, most existing CNN-based methods for drivable area detection only consider information within a local neighborhood, thus failing to effectively capture long-range dependencies. To tackle this concern, we propose a novel U-shaped network based on the Swin Transformer. The Swin Transformer block was employed as the fundamental element of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, an upsampling layer was introduced in the decoder to effectively restore the resolution of the feature map. We evaluate our approach on the Cityscapes dataset, a publicly available benchmark for autonomous driving. Experimental results verify the exceptional performance of our proposed method, achieving an impressive mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) score of 91.61%. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in road segmentation detection, further demonstrating its superiority.