Lossy Compression to Reduce Latency of Local Image Transfer for Autonomous Off-Road Perception Systems

Autonomous vehicles greatly rely on their perception system for navigation. Semantic segmentation provides a much better understanding of a vehicle’s surroundings than object detection. Unfortunately, complete image segmentation comes at a higher computational cost than object detection, which complicates developing a real-time perception system using semantic segmentation. Perception systems contain other bottlenecks too, and are not only limited by their deep learning model. An inherent amount of latency exists in data transfer, specifically through Ethernet. A vehicle’s camera feed must be transferred to an edge device for image processing as part of the autonomous driving decision-making process. This study investigates decreasing image transfer time by using various levels of JPEG compression as well as further understanding how compression affects the accuracy of semantic segmentation. Additionally, as most autonomous driving research focuses on urban environments, we look to explore autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the off-road space by using the Rellis-3D dataset. We train and evaluate SwiftNet, a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation model, at different JPEG compression ratios and identify the accuracy. The transfer time of these different compression ratios is tested on three images. Results show a continual decrease in accuracy occurs as the compression ratios increase. When training SwiftNet on the train set with no compression, the highest compression ratio of 16.96 achieves a mean intersection over union (mIoU) score of 67.9% compared to the baseline achieving 78.9% mIoU. There is an increase in the accuracy of the higher compression ratios by training SwiftNet on the corresponding compression ratios; the highest compression ratio reaches 74.9% mIoU. Lastly, we notice a positive transfer speedup of these higher compression ratios when inducing JPEG compression in all transfer scenarios: (a) 1870 images (b) 10 images, (c) 1 image. Each scenario has a speedup of 1.18×, 1.14×, and 1.06×, respectively.