Reinforcement Learning and Genetic Algorithm-Based Network Module for Camera-LiDAR Detection

Cameras and LiDAR sensors have been used in sensor fusion for robust object detection in autonomous driving. Object detection networks for autonomous driving are often trained again by adding or changing datasets aimed at robust performance. Repeat training is necessary to develop an efficient network module. Existing efficient network module development changes to hand design and requires much module design experience. For this, a neural architecture search was designed, but it takes much time and requires optimizing the design process. To solve this problem, we propose a two-stage optimization method for the offspring generation process in a neural architecture search based on reinforcement learning. In addition, we propose utilizing two split datasets to solve the fast convergence problem as the objective function of the genetic algorithm: source data (daytime, sunny) and target data (day/night, adversary weather). The proposed method is an efficient module generation method requiring less time than the NSGA-NET. We confirmed the performance improvement and the convergence speed reduction using the Dense dataset. Through experiments, it was proven that the proposed method generated an efficient module.