Detection of Active Emergency Vehicles using Per-Frame CNNs and Output Smoothing

Abstract

While inferring common actor states (such as position or velocity) is an important and well-explored task of the perception system aboard a self-driving vehicle (SDV), it may not always provide sufficient information to the SDV. This is especially true in the case of active emergency vehicles (EVs), where light-based signals also need to be captured to provide a full context. We consider this problem and propose a sequential methodology for the detection of active EVs, using an off-the-shelf CNN model operating at a frame level and a downstream smoother that accounts for the temporal aspect of flashing EV lights. We also explore model improvements through data augmentation and training with additional hard samples.