Edge Intelligence Empowered Vehicle Detection and Image Segmentation for Autonomous Vehicles

Edge intelligence (EI) migrates data and artificial intelligence (AI) to the “edge” of a network, enhancing the high-bandwidth and low-latency of wireless data transmission with the multiplier effect of 5G and AI, greatly improving the edges’ processing speed. Through integrating EI and computer vision technology, video surveillance systems in ITS can improve the processing capability of traffic information, which improves traffic efficiency and ensures traffic safety. Accordingly, first, we propose an edge intelligence-based improved-YOLOv4 vehicle detection algorithm, introducing an efficient channel attention (ECA) mechanism and a high-resolution network (HRNet) to enhance vehicle detection ability. Second, an edge intelligence-based improved DeepLabv3+ image segmentation algorithm is proposed, replacing the original backbone network with MobileNetv2 and using the softpool method, thus reducing the network size while improving the segmentation accuracy. Experimental results show that our proposed model has a higher average precision (AP) and can improve vehicle detection accuracy from 82.03% to 86.22%. The mean intersection over union (mIOU) of the image segmentation model improves from 73.32% to 75.63%.