Boosting the Response of Object Detection and Steering Angle Prediction for Self-Driving Control

Our previous work introduced the LW-YOLOv4-tiny and the LW-ResNet18 models by replacing traditional convolution with the Ghost Conv to achieve rapid object detection and steering angle prediction, respectively. However, the entire object detection and steering angle prediction process has encountered a speed limit problem. Therefore, this study aims to significantly speed up the object detection and the steering angle prediction simultaneously. This paper proposes the GhostBottleneck approach to speed the frame rate of feature extraction and add the SElayer method to maintain the existing precision of object detection, which constructs an enhanced object detection model abbreviated as LWGSE-YOLOv4-tiny. In addition, this paper also conducted depthwise separable convolution to simplify the Ghost Conv as depthwise separable and ghost convolution, which constructs an improved steering angle prediction model abbreviated as LWDSG-ResNet18 that can considerably speed up the prediction and slightly increase image recognition accuracy. Compared with our previous work, the proposed approach shows that the GhostBottleneck module can significantly boost the frame rate of feature extraction by 9.98%, and SElayer can upgrade the precision of object detection slightly by 0.41%. Moreover, depthwise separable and ghost convolution can considerably boost prediction speed by 20.55% and increase image recognition accuracy by 2.05%.