A Convolutional Neural Network-Based End-to-End Self-Driving Using LiDAR and Camera Fusion: Analysis Perspectives in a Real-World Environment

In this paper, we develop end-to-end autonomous driving based on a 2D LiDAR sensor and camera sensor that predict the control value of the vehicle from the input data, instead of modeling rule-based autonomous driving. Different from many studies utilizing simulated data, we created an end-to-end autonomous driving algorithm with data obtained from real driving and analyzing the performance of our proposed algorithm. Based on the data obtained from an actual urban driving environment, end-to-end autonomous driving was possible in an informal environment such as a traffic signal by predicting the vehicle control value based on a convolution neural network. In addition, this paper solves the data imbalance problem by eliminating redundant data for each frame during stopping and driving in the driving environment so we can improve the performance of self-driving. Finally, we verified through the activation map how the network predicts the vertical and horizontal control values by recognizing the traffic facilities in the driving environment. Experiments and analysis will be shown to show the validity of the proposed algorithm.