Confidence Evaluation for Machine Learning Schemes in Vehicular Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study a cooperative perception scheme in a vehicular sensor network, attempting to fuse the semantic information provided by different sensors at multiple vehicles, so as to expand the vehicle’s perception range, eliminate blind spots, improve the ability to handle environmental interference and enhance the accuracy and robustness of the perception results. The key to guide the fusion process is the evaluation of the confidence levels of the outputs provided by various machine learning schemes implemented at individual sensors in the vehicular sensor network. We first propose an evaluation criterion termed as Environmental Sensitivity (ES), which is used to measure the sensitivity of the network to environmental changes. Based on the ES, we further evaluate the confidence of the perception output of neural networks and quantify the confidence level considering the abnormal level of the input data, the general performance of the perception algorithm, the detection performance and the ES of the network. Semantic information fusion algorithm is then developed based upon the confidence levels. Experiment results are provided to validate the proposed fusion method in various scenarios.