Abstract

Ever wondered how the world was before the internet was invented? You might soon wonder how the world would survive without self-driving cars and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The extensive research taking place in this rapidly evolving field is making self-driving cars futuristic and more reliable. The goal of this research is to design and develop hardware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators for self-driving cars, that can process audio and visual sensory information. The idea is to imitate a human brain that takes audio and visual data as input while driving. To achieve a single die that can process both audio and visual sensory information, it takes two different kinds of accelerators where one processes visual data from images captured by a camera and the other processes audio information from audio recordings. The Convolutional Neural Network AI algorithm is chosen to classify images and audio data.

Image CNN (ICNN) is used to classify images and Audio CNN (ACNN) to classify any sound of significance while driving. The two networks are designed from scratch and implemented in software and hardware. The software implementation of the two AI networks utilizes the Numpy library of Python, while the hardware implementation is done in Verilog®. CNN is trained to classify between three classes of objects, Cars, Lights, and Lanes, while the other CNN is trained to classify sirens from an emergency vehicle, vehicle horn, and speech.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Image analysis--Data processing; Computer vision; Signal processing--Digital techniques; Neural networks (Computer science); Convolutions (Mathematics); Automated vehicles--Data processing

Publication Date

5-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Electrical Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Electrical Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Mark A. Indovina

Advisor/Committee Member

Dorin Patru

Advisor/Committee Member

Amlan Ganguly

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

EEEE-MS

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