ProvRain: Rain-Adaptive Denoising and Vehicle Detection via MobileNet-UNet and Faster R-CNN

Abstract

Provident vehicle detection has a lot of scope in the detection of vehicle during night time. The extraction of features other than the headlamps of vehicles allows us to detect oncoming vehicles before they appear directly on the camera. However, it faces multiple issues especially in the field of night vision, where a lot of noise caused due to weather conditions such as rain or snow as well as camera conditions. This paper focuses on creating a pipeline aimed at dealing with such noise while at the same time maintaining the accuracy of provident vehicular detection. The pipeline in this paper, ProvRain, uses a lightweight MobileNet-U-Net architecture tuned to generalize to robust weather conditions by using the concept of curricula training. A mix of synthetic as well as available data from the PVDN dataset is used for this. This pipeline is compared to the base Faster RCNN architecture trained on the PVDN dataset to see how much the addition of a denoising architecture helps increase the detection model's performance in rainy conditions. The system boasts an 8.94\% increase in accuracy and a 10.25\% increase in recall in the detection of vehicles in rainy night time frames. Similarly, the custom MobileNet-U-Net architecture that was trained also shows a 10-15\% improvement in PSNR, a 5-6\% increase in SSIM, and upto a 67\% reduction in perceptual error (LPIPS) compared to other transformer approaches.