Roadside Unit-based Unknown Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions for Smart Internet of Vehicles

For Internet of Vehicles applications, reliable autonomous driving systems usually perform the majority of their computations on the cloud due to the limited computing power of edge devices. The communication delay between cloud platforms and edge devices, however, can cause dangerous consequences, particularly for latency-sensitive object detection tasks. Object detection tasks are also vulnerable to significantly degraded model performance caused by unknown objects, which creates unsafe driving conditions. To address these problems, this study develops an orchestrated system that allows real-time object detection and incrementally learns unknown objects in a complex and dynamic environment. A you-only-look-once–based object detection model in edge computing mode uses thermal images to detect objects accurately in poor lighting conditions. In addition, an attention mechanism improves the system’s performance without significantly increasing model complexity. An unknown object detector automatically classifies and labels unknown objects without direct supervision on edge devices, while a roadside unit (RSU)-based mechanism is developed to update classes and ensure a secure driving experience for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, the interactions between edge devices, RSU servers, and the cloud are designed to allow efficient collaboration. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system learns uncategorized objects dynamically and detects instances accurately.