Autonomous Vehicle Control for Lane and Vehicle Tracking by Using Deep Learning via Vision

Camera-based lane detection and vehicle tracking algorithms are one of the keystones for many autonomous systems. The navigational process of those systems is mainly focused on the output of detection algorithms. However, detection algorithms for lane detection need more pre-processing time and computational effort. They are also affected by environmental conditions and must regularly be improved. In this paper machine learning techniques and computer vision algorithms are utilized for the tasks of the lane and vehicle tracking of an autonomous vehicle control scenario. With the nature of used learning algorithm, the proposed system can handle complex image problems. The vehicle, on which we implement our algorithms, can manage to carry out the following tasks autonomously; tracking the lanes, following another vehicle, and stopping in necessary conditions. For that, one of the primary purposes is image-based lane tracking methodology by using learning algorithms. Data augmentation is applied to create diversity for the dataset. Application in this methodology has been discussed. For lane tracking Convolutional Neural Network architecture which is based on NVIDIA's PilotNet is preferred. For detecting objects and vehicles, the system is trained on the faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) to identify traffic light and stop sign are by Haar Cascade Classifier. All these learning models are trained on NVIDIA GTX 1070 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to reduce training time. Experimental results showed that the proposed system gives a favorable result to autonomously control vehicles for lane and vehicle tracking purposes by vision.