Deep Neural Network Gaussian Process Regression Method for End-to-end Driving Behavior Learning

For dynamic complex driving tasks of autonomous vehicle, traditional driving behavior learning methods still need to be improved in terms of learning accuracy and generalization performance. A convolutional neural network gaussian process regression (CNN-GPR) method for driving behavior learning is proposed to tackle these problems that full connection layers of end-to-end convolutional neural networks (CNN) have limited generalization ability and easily converge to local optimization. At the same time, the PilotNet-GPR algorithm based on the CNN-GPR method is designed. The gaussian process regression (GPR) method with global mapping capability and better generalization performance is used to improve fully connected layers of the end-to-end CNN in order to complete the mapping from features extracted to driving actions more efficiently for the proposed CNN-GPR method. In addition, the long short-term memory network (LSTM) is added into CNN-GPR method, and a convolutional long short-term memory network gaussian process regression (CNN-LSTM-GPR) method of driving behavior learning with time-sequential images is proposed in order to further improve the accuracy of driving behavior learning through time-sequential information. This method utilises the gaussian process regression method to improve structures of fully connected layers in the cascaded deep neural network (CNN-LSTM) in order to make a more efficient learning approximation between features extracted by the CNN-LSTM and driving actions. Verification experiments on the Apollo end-to-end dataset for autonomous driving show that the proposed CNN-GPR method can further improve the imitation accuracy for end-to-end driving behavior learning and promote generalization performance of learned models compared with the PilotNet method. compared with related end-to-end driving behavior learning methods based on single image under the same condition, the proposed CNN-LSTM-GPR method can make full use of time-sequential information of images, which leads to smaller imitation errors. Additionally, it can further enhance the learning accuracy and demonstrates a more satisfying generalization performance compared with the CNN-LSTM method.