Most existing approaches to autonomous driving fall into one of two
categories: modular pipelines, that build an extensive model of the
environment, and imitation learning approaches, that map images directly to
control outputs. A recently proposed third paradigm, direct perception, aims to
combine the advantages of both by using a neural network to learn appropriate
low-dimensional intermediate representations. However, existing direct
perception approaches are restricted to simple highway situations, lacking the
ability to navigate intersections, stop at traffic lights or respect speed
limits. In this work, we propose a direct perception approach which maps video
input to intermediate representations suitable for autonomous navigation in
complex urban environments given high-level directional inputs. Compared to
state-of-the-art reinforcement and conditional imitation learning approaches,
we achieve an improvement of up to 68 % in goal-directed navigation on the
challenging CARLA simulation benchmark. In addition, our approach is the first
to handle traffic lights and speed signs by using image-level labels only, as
well as smooth car-following, resulting in a significant reduction of traffic
accidents in simulation.

该研究提出了一种基于直接感知的自主驾驶方法，在城市环境中能够根据高级方向输入进行自主导航，同时能够识别交通信号灯和速度标志，降低车辆事故率。