Environmental Sensitivity Evaluation of Neural Networks in Unmanned Vehicle Perception Module

For autonomous driving of unmanned vehicles in intelligent transportation systems, multi-vehicle cooperative perception supported by vehicular networks can greatly improve the accuracy and reliability of the perception decisions. Currently, the perception decisions for a single vehicle are mostly provided by neural networks. Therefore, in order to fuse the perception decisions from multiple vehicles, the credibility of the neural network outputs needs to be studied. Among various factors, the environment is one of the most important affecting vehicles’ perception decisions. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation criteria for the neural networks used in the perception module of unmanned vehicles. This criterion is termed as Environmental Sensitivity (ES), indicates the sensitivity of the network to environmental changes. We design an algorithm to quantitatively measure the ES value of different perception networks based on the extracted features. Experimental results show that our algorithm can well capture the sensitivity of the network in different environments and the ES values will be helpful to the subsequent decision fusion process.