In the realm of deploying Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ML-ADAS) into real-world scenarios, adverse weather conditions pose a significant challenge. Conventional ML models trained on clear weather data falter when faced with scenarios like extreme fog or heavy rain, potentially leading to accidents and safety hazards. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel approach: employing a Denoising Deep Neural Network as a preprocessing step to transform adverse weather images into clear weather images, thereby enhancing the robustness of ML-ADAS systems. The proposed method eliminates the need for retraining all subsequent Depp Neural Networks (DNN) in the ML-ADAS pipeline, thus saving computational resources and time. Moreover, it improves driver visualization, which is critical for safe navigation in adverse weather conditions. By leveraging the UNet architecture trained on an augmented KITTI dataset with synthetic adverse weather images, we develop the Weather UNet (WUNet) DNN to remove weather artifacts. Our study demonstrates substantial performance improvements in object detection with WUNet preprocessing under adverse weather conditions. Notably, in scenarios involving extreme fog, our proposed solution improves the mean Average Precision (mAP) score of the YOLOv8n from 4% to 70%.

本文介绍了一种创新方法，即采用去噪深度神经网络作为预处理步骤，将恶劣天气图像转换为晴朗天气图像，从而提高ML-ADAS系统的鲁棒性。通过使用基于UNet架构训练的Weather UNet（WUNet）深度神经网络，我们的研究在恶劣天气条件下实现了物体检测性能的显著提升。特别是在极度雾霾的情况下，我们的解决方案将YOLOv8n的平均准确率（mAP）从4%提高到70%。

强大的ADAS：增强基于机器学习的先进驾驶辅助系统在恶劣天气下的稳健性