DriveGuard: Robustification of Automated Driving Systems With Deep Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Autoencoder

Andreas Papachristodoulou, Christos Kyrkou, Theocharis Theocharides; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 107-116

Autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on cameras to provide the input for perception and scene understanding and the ability of these models to classify their environment and objects, under adverse conditions and image noise is crucial. When the input is, either unintentionally or through targeted attacks, deteriorated, the reliability of autonomous vehicle is compromised. In order to mitigate such phenomena, we propose DriveGuard, a lightweight spatio-temporal autoencoder, as a solution to robustify the image segmentation process for autonomous vehicles. By first processing camera images with DriveGuard, we offer a more universal solution than having to re-train each perception model with noisy input. We explore the space of different autoencoder architectures and evaluate them on a diverse dataset created with real and synthetic images demonstrating that by exploiting spatio-temporal information combined with multi-component loss we significantly increase robustness against adverse image effects reaching within 5-6% of that of the original model on clean images.