Road Scene Risk Perception for Intelligent Vehicles Using End-to-End Affordance Learning and Visual Reasoning

A key goal of intelligent vehicles is to provide a safer and more efficient method of transportation. One important aspect of intelligent vehicles is to understand the road scene using vehicle-mounted camera images. Perceiving the level of driving risk of a given road scene enables intelligent vehicles to drive more efficiently without compromising on safety. Existing road scene understanding methods, however, do not explicitly nor holistically model this notion of driving risk. This paper proposes a new perspective on scene risk perception by modeling end-to-end road scene affordance using a weakly supervised classifier. A subset of images from BDD100k dataset was relabeled to evaluate the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model is able to correctly classify three different levels of risk. Further, saliency maps were used to demonstrate that the proposed model is capable of visually reasoning about the underlying causes of its decision. By understanding risk holistically, the proposed method is intended to be complementary to existing advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles.