Deep neural network algorithms have achieved impressive performance in object detection. Real-time evaluation of perception uncertainty from deep neural network algorithms is indispensable for safe driving in autonomous vehicles. More research is required to determine how to assess the effectiveness and uncertainty of perception findings in real-time.This paper proposes a novel real-time evaluation method combining multi-source perception fusion and deep ensemble. The effectiveness of single-frame perception results is evaluated in real-time. Then, the spatial uncertainty of the detected objects and influencing factors are analyzed. Finally, the accuracy of spatial uncertainty is validated with the ground truth in the KITTI dataset. The research results show that the evaluation of perception effectiveness can reach 92% accuracy, and a positive correlation with the ground truth is found for both the uncertainty and the error. The spatial uncertainty is related to the distance and occlusion degree of detected objects.
Keywords: autonomous driving; deep ensemble; deep learning; object detection; perception uncertainty; prediction entropy; spatial uncertainty; uncertainty estimation.