Deep learning framework for vehicle and pedestrian detection in rural roads on an embedded GPU

Abstract

Object detection, one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision. Nowadays some dedicated embedded systems have emerged as a powerful strategy for deliver high processing capabilities including the NVIDIA Jetson family. The aim of the present work is the recognition of objects in complex rural areas through an embedded system, as well as the verification of accuracy and processing time. For this purpose, a low power embedded Graphics Processing Unit (Jetson Nano) has been selected, which allows multiple neural networks to be run in simultaneous and a computer vision algorithm to be applied for image recognition. As well, the performance of these deep learning neural networks such as ssd-mobilenet v1 and v2, pednet, multiped and ssd-inception v2 has been tested. Moreover, it was found that the accuracy and processing time were in some cases improved when all the models suggested in the research were applied. The pednet network model provides a high performance in pedestrian recognition, however, the sdd-mobilenet v2 and ssd-inception v2 models are better at detecting other objects such as vehicles in complex scenarios.