Neural Architecture Search for Automotive Grid Fusion Networks Under Embedded Hardware Constraints

The goal of automotive sensor fusion is to generate an environmental model with low-cost, mass-produced sensors-typically camera and radar. The central fusion controller needs sophisticated post-processing algorithms to achieve this goal despite extensive pre-processing on the sensor side. Recent advances show the capabilities of deep convolutional auto-encoders for sensor fusion but are still limited to high-performance hardware. Limited memory and processing capabilities of embedded devices lead to the multi-objective optimization problem addressed in this work. The proposed evolutionary neural architecture search is configured to find novel sensor fusion network architectures optimized for embedded hardware. The discovered encoding and decoding cells improve fusion performance compared to that of corresponding cells from literature. These lightweight network architectures allow the deployment on constrained embedded devices, thus leverage environmental perception of level 2/2+ automated cars.