Towards AI-Powered Edge Intelligence for Object Detection in Self-Driving Cars: Enhancing IoV Efficiency and Safety

In the rapidly advancing field of intelligent transportation systems, integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with edge computing presents a promising way to enhance the safety and efficiency of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). This study explores and presents a deep learning based object detection model within an edge computing framework which aims to facilitate real time object detection in self driving cars. Using an urban traffic scenarios based dataset, our research shows the ability of the model to accurately detect and classify various objects important for autonomous driving. The YOLOv8 model is used in this work due to its optimal balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. This model has also demonstrated its worth by achieving good performance results, including an average precision of 0.79, a recall of 0.62, and an F1-score of 0.69. The results are demonstrated by a detailed confusion matrix, highlighting the model’s effectiveness in complex driving environments and underscoring its reliability for in-vehicle deployment. By implementing AI directly on edge devices within vehicles, our approach might be helpful in significantly reducing latency, boosting decision-making speed, and enhancing data privacy by minimising dependence on cloud processing. The findings not only support the model’s capabilities but also illustrate the practical benefits of edge intelligence in autonomous vehicles. These benefits, such as faster decision-making and improved data privacy, contribute effectively to the IoV infrastructure. This study marks a substantial step towards recognising the possibility of AI-enhanced edge computing in driving the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology.