TwinLiteNet: An Efficient and Lightweight Model for Driveable Area and Lane Segmentation in Self-Driving Cars

Semantic segmentation is a common task in autonomous driving to understand the surrounding environment. Driveable Area Segmentation and Lane Detection are particularly important for safe and efficient navigation on the road. However, original semantic segmentation models are computationally expensive and require high-end hardware, which is not feasible for embedded systems in autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes a lightweight model for the driveable area and lane line segmentation. TwinLiteNet is designed cheaply but achieves accurate and efficient segmentation results. We evaluate TwinLiteNet on the BDD100K dataset and compare it with modern models. Experimental results show that our TwinLiteNet performs similarly to existing approaches, requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Specifically, TwinLiteNet achieves a mIoU score of 91.3% for the Drivable Area task and 31.08% IoU for the Lane Detection task with only 0.4 million parameters and achieves 415 FPS on GPU RTX A5000. Furthermore, TwinLiteNet can run in real-time on embedded devices with limited computing power, especially since it achieves 60FPS on Jetson Xavier NX, making it an ideal solution for self-driving vehicles. Code is available: url{https://github.com/chequanghuy/TwinLiteNet}.

Character Time-series Matching For Robust License Plate Recognition

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is becoming a popular study area and is applied in many fields such as transportation or smart city. However, there are still several limitations when applying many current methods to practical problems due to the variation in real-world situations such as light changes, unclear License Plate (LP) characters, and image quality. Almost recent ALPR algorithms process on a single frame, which reduces accuracy in case of worse image quality. This paper presents methods to improve license plate recognition accuracy by tracking the license plate in multiple frames. First, the Adaptive License Plate Rotation algorithm is applied to correctly align the detected license plate. Second, we propose a method called Character Time-series Matching to recognize license plate characters from many consequence frames. The proposed method archives high performance in the UFPR-ALPR dataset which is \boldmath$96.7\%$ accuracy in real-time on RTX A5000 GPU card. We also deploy the algorithm for the Vietnamese ALPR system. The accuracy for license plate detection and character recognition are 0.881 and 0.979 $mAP^{test}$@.5 respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/chequanghuy/Character-Time-series-Matching.git