Online Out-of-Domain Detection for Automated Driving

Ensuring safety in automated driving is a major challenge for the automotive industry. Special attention is paid to artificial intelligence, in particular to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which is considered a key technology in the realization of highly automated driving. DNNs learn from training data, which means that they only achieve good accuracy within the underlying data distribution of the training data. When leaving the training domain, a distributional shift is caused, which can lead to a drastic reduction of accuracy. In this work, we present a proof of concept for a safety mechanism that can detect the leaving of the domain online, i.e. at runtime. In our experiments with the Synthia data set we can show that a 100 % correct detection of whether the input data is inside or outside the domain is achieved. The ability to detect when the vehicle leaves the domain can be an important requirement for certification.