Scene Novelty Prediction from Unsupervised Discriminative Feature Learning

Deep learning approaches are widely explored in safety-critical autonomous driving systems on various tasks. Network models, trained on big data, map input to probable prediction results. However, it is unclear how to get a measure of confidence on this prediction at the test time. Our approach to gain this additional information is to estimate how similar test data is to the training data that the model was trained on. We map training instances onto a feature space that is the most discriminative among them. We then model the entire training set as a Gaussian distribution in that feature space. The novelty of the test data is characterized by its low probability of being in that distribution, or equivalently a large Mahalanobis distance in the feature space. Our distance metric in the discriminative feature space achieves a better novelty prediction performance than the state-of-the-art methods on most classes in CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Using semantic segmentation as a proxy task often needed for autonomous driving, we show that our unsupervised novelty prediction correlates with the performance of a segmentation network trained on full pixel-wise annotations. These experimental results demonstrate potential applications of our method upon identifying scene familiarity and quantifying the confidence in autonomous driving actions.