Traffic Scene Perception Based on Joint Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Traffic scene visual perception technology is very important for intelligent transportation. Although the emerging panoptic segmentation is the most desirable sensing technology, object detection and semantic segmentation are relatively more mature and have fewer requirements for data annotation. In this paper, a joint object detection and semantic segmentation perception method is proposed for both practicability and accuracy. The proposed method is based on the results of object detection and semantic segmentation. Firstly, the result of basic semantic segmentation is preprocessed according to the principle of entropy. Secondly, the candidate bounding boxes of pedestrians and vehicles are extracted by object detection. Thirdly, candidate bounding boxes are optimized by using a K-means based vertex clustering algorithm. Finally, the contours of scene elements are matched with the results of semantic segmentation. The experimental results on the Cityscapes dataset show that the final perception effect is more susceptible to semantic segmentation results. The theoretical upper limit of the actual perception effect is 95.4% of the ground-truth of panoptic segmentation. The proposed method can effectively combine object detection and semantic segmentation, and achieve perception results similar to panoptic segmentation without additional data annotation.