An Autonomous Illumination System for Vehicle Documentation Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

A common problem for machine vision applications is uncontrolled illumination conditions that cause undesired artifacts on sensorial data. For instance, quality inspection using color cameras, while having wide industrial application, requires manual illumination adjustment and is severely affected by external lighting sources and the physical properties of the inspected object. To overcome this problem, we propose an autonomous illumination solution, that adjusts illumination via a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent following a goal-oriented reward that takes into account image entropy and specularity. The system is validated in a challenging vehicle documentation use case where vehicle images are captured under various lighting conditions using a camera and an in-house built illumination system. The DRL agent learns to control illumination levels directly from high-dimensional visual inputs by mapping the interactions from the environment to the reward-driven control actions of the illumination system, targeting an optimal illumination zone even under the appearance of abrupt illumination changes in the environment.