A Safety Analysis Method for Perceptual Components in Automated Driving

The use of machine learning (ML) is increasing in many sectors of safety-critical software development and in particular, for the perceptual components of automated driving (AD) functionality. Although some traditional safety engineering techniques such as FTA and FMEA are applicable to ML components, the unique characteristics of ML create challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel safety analysis method called Classification Failure Mode Effects Analysis (CFMEA) which is specialized to assess classification-based perception in AD. Specifically, it defines a systematic way to assess the risk due to classification failure under adversarial attacks or varying degrees of classification uncertainty across the perception-control linkage. We first present the theoretical and methodological foundations for CFMEA, and then demonstrate it by applying it to an AD case study using semantic segmentation perception trained with the Cityscapes driving dataset. Finally, we discuss how CFMEA results could be used to improve an ML-model.