- Thesis by Andreas Kachanov
- Supervisors: Dr. Marcel Neuhausen, Prof. Nils Jansen
Quantifying Uncertainties in Depth Estimation for Autonomous Driving in CARLA.
This bachelor thesis deals with the topic of distance estimation in the context of autonomous driving. There is a variety of techniques and sensors used in this field, often using multiple combinations and complex pipelines to estimate distances with high precision. In this thesis, I focus on a simple, straightforward architecture using only a monocular camera. For that, I have built a convolutional neural network that takes images from a single camera mounted on the hood of the vehicle as input and outputs a distance estimation. The model is trained with custom generated datasets in the CARLA simulator, which are used to train the model in a supervised manner. Furthermore, I analyze different model parameters and their impact on the performance, especially the resulting uncertainty of the model. The uncertainty aspects are analyzed using a deep ensemble, where multiple models with the same parameters are trained and compared on their performance, and a variety of image augmentations to test their influence on the model’s uncertainty.