Image Recognition Based Autonomous Driving: A Deep Learning Approach

Autonomous vehicle (AV) is a broad field in artificial intelligence which has seen monumental growth in the past decade and this had a significant impact in bridging the gap between the capability the intelligence of human and the efficiency of machines. With millions of people losing their lives, or have being a victim of road traffic accidents. There is a need to find a suitable algorithm for a navigation system in an autonomous vehicle with the purpose of help mitigate the traffic rule violation that most human drivers make that lead leads to traffic accidents. With both researchers and enthusiasts developing several algorithms for AVs, this field has been split into several modules which continually broaden the scope of AV’s technology. In this paper, we focus on the lane navigation which has an important part of the AV movement on the road. Here lane decision making is optimized by using deep learning techniques in creating a Neural Network model that focuses on generating steering commands by taking an image the road mapped out with lane markings. The navigation aid is a front-facing camera mounted and images from the camera are used to compute steering commands. The end to end learning scheme was developed by Nvidia cooperation to train a model to compute steering command from a front-facing camera. The model does not focus on detecting the lane but only generating the appropriate command for steering AVs’ on the road. This focus on one objective of the model helps in maximizing the potential of better accuracy in lane navigation of our AVs. The modeled car navigates through the designed lanes accurately with the level of intelligence the car shows in maneuvering through the lanes shows this method is more suitable in lane navigation.