Comparative Analysis Between Recurrent Convolutional and Convolutional Neural Networks for Horizon Detection

Abstract

The preliminary step in the navigation of Unmanned Vehicles is to detect and identify the horizon line. One method to locate the horizon and obstacles in an image is through a supervised learning, semantic segmentation algorithm using Neural Networks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly gaining prominence in military, commercial and civilian applications. For the safe navigation of UAVs, there poses a requirement for an accurate and efficient obstacle detection and avoidance. The position of the horizon and obstacles can also be used for adjusting flight parameters and estimating altitude. It can also be used for the navigation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), by neglecting the part of the image above the horizon to reduce the processing time. Locating the horizon and identifying the various obstacles in an image can help in minimizing collisions and high costs due to failure of UAVs and UGVs. To achieve a robust and accurate system to aid navigation of autonomous vehicles, the efficiency and accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent-CNNs (RCNN) are analysed. It is observed via experimentation that the RCNN model classifies test images with higher accuracy.