Claus Lenz

Annkathrin Krämmer, Christoph Schöller, Dhiraj Gulati et al.

The environmental perception of an autonomous vehicle is limited by its physical sensor ranges and algorithmic performance, as well as by occlusions that degrade its understanding of an ongoing traffic situation. This not only poses a significant threat to safety and limits driving speeds, but it can also lead to inconvenient maneuvers. Intelligent Infrastructure Systems can help to alleviate these problems. An Intelligent Infrastructure System can fill in the gaps in a vehicle's perception and extend its field of view by providing additional detailed information about its surroundings, in the form of a digital model of the current traffic situation, i.e. a digital twin. However, detailed descriptions of such systems and working prototypes demonstrating their feasibility are scarce. In this paper, we propose a hardware and software architecture that enables such a reliable Intelligent Infrastructure System to be built. We have implemented this system in the real world and demonstrate its ability to create an accurate digital twin of an extended highway stretch, thus enhancing an autonomous vehicle's perception beyond the limits of its on-board sensors. Furthermore, we evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the digital twin by using aerial images and earth observation methods for generating ground truth data.

Felix Altenberger, Claus Lenz

Artificial neural networks have recently shown great results in many disciplines and a variety of applications, including natural language understanding, speech processing, games and image data generation. One particular application in which the strong performance of artificial neural networks was demonstrated is the recognition of objects in images, where deep convolutional neural networks are commonly applied. In this survey, we give a comprehensive introduction to this topic (object recognition with deep convolutional neural networks), with a strong focus on the evolution of network architectures. Therefore, we aim to compress the most important concepts in this field in a simple and non-technical manner to allow for future researchers to have a quick general understanding. This work is structured as follows: 1. We will explain the basic ideas of (convolutional) neural networks and deep learning and examine their usage for three object recognition tasks: image classification, object localization and object detection. 2. We give a review on the evolution of deep convolutional neural networks by providing an extensive overview of the most important network architectures presented in chronological order of their appearances.