Attention transfer from human to neural networks for road object detection in winter

• Published in: IET image processing 2022-11, Vol.16 (13), p.3544-3556
• Main Authors: Boisclair, Jonathan, Kelouwani, Sousso, Ayevide, Follivi Kloutse, Amamou, Ali, Alam, Muhammad Zeshan, Agbossou, Kodjo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1751-9659; 1751-9667
• DOI: 10.1049/ipr2.12562

As an essential feature of autonomous road vehicles, obstacle detection must be executed on a real‐time onboard platform with high accuracy. Cameras are still the most commonly used sensors in autonomous driving. Most detections using cameras are based on convolutional neural networks. In this regard, a recent teacher–student approach, called transfer learning, has been used to improve the neural network training process. This approach has only been used with a neural network acting as a teacher to the best of our knowledge. This paper proposes a novel way of improving training data based on attention transfer by getting the attention map from a human. The proposed method allows the dataset size reduction by 50%, which leads to up to a 60% decline in the training time. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can enhance the F1‐score of the network by up to 10% in winter conditions.