Efficient textual explanations for complex road and traffic scenarios based on semantic segmentation

The complex driving environment brings great challenges to the visual perception of autonomous vehicles. The accuracy of visual perception drops off sharply under diverse weather conditions and uncertain traffic flow. Black box model makes it difficult to interpret the mechanisms of visual perception. To enhance the user acceptance and reliability of the visual perception system, a textual explanation of the scene evolvement is essential. It analyzes the geometry and topology structure in the complex environment and offers clues to decision and control. However, the existing scene explanation has been implemented as a separate model. It cannot detect comprehensive textual information and requires a high computational load and time consumption. Thus, this study proposed a comprehensive and efficient textual explanation model for complex road and traffic scenarios. From 336k video frames of the driving environment, critical images of complex road and traffic scenarios were selected into a dataset. Through transfer learning, this study established an accurate and efficient segmentation model to gain semantic information. Based on the XGBoost algorithm, a comprehensive model was developed. The model obtained textual information including road types, the motion of conflict objects, and scenario complexity. The approach was verified on the real-world road. It improved the perception accuracy of critical traffic elements to 78.8%. The time consumption reached 13 minutes for each epoch, which was 11.5 times more efficient compared with the pre-trained network. The textual information analyzed from the model was also accordant with reality. The findings explain how autonomous vehicle detects the driving environment, which lays a foundation for subsequent decision and control. It can improve the perception ability by enriching the prior knowledge and judgments for complex traffic situations.