Aiming at enhancing the accuracy and reliability of velocity calculation in vision navigation, an improved method is proposed in this paper. The method integrates Mask-R-CNN (Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) and K-Means with the pyramid Lucas Kanade algorithm in order to reduce the harmful effect of moving objects on velocity calculation. Firstly, Mask-R-CNN is used to recognize the objects which have motions relative to the ground and covers them with masks to enhance the similarity between pixels and to reduce the impacts of the noisy moving pixels. Then, the pyramid Lucas Kanade algorithm is used to calculate the optical flow value. Finally, the value is clustered by the K-Means algorithm to abandon the outliers, and vehicle velocity is calculated by the processed optical flow. The prominent advantages of the proposed algorithm are (i) decreasing the bad impacts to velocity calculation, due to the objects which have relative motions; (ii) obtaining the correct optical flow sets and velocity calculation outputs with less fluctuation; and (iii) the applicability enhancement of the optical flow algorithm in complex navigation environment. The proposed algorithm is tested by actual experiments. Results with superior precision and reliability show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for vehicle velocity calculation in vision navigation system.

Recently, multi-level feature networks have been extensively used in instance segmentation. However, because not all features are beneficial to instance segmentation tasks, the performance of networks cannot be adequately improved by synthesizing multi-level convolutional features indiscriminately. In order to solve the problem, an attention-based feature pyramid module (AFPM) is proposed, which integrates the attention mechanism on the basis of a multi-level feature pyramid network to efficiently and pertinently extract the high-level semantic features and low-level spatial structure features; for instance, segmentation. Firstly, we adopt a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) into feature extraction, and sequentially generate attention maps which focus on instance-related features along the channel and spatial dimensions. Secondly, we build inter-dimensional dependencies through a convolutional triplet attention module (CTAM) in lateral attention connections, which is used to propagate a helpful semantic feature map and filter redundant informative features irrelevant to instance objects. Finally, we construct branches for feature enhancement to strengthen detailed information to boost the entire feature hierarchy of the network. The experimental results on the Cityscapes dataset manifest that the proposed module outperforms other excellent methods under different evaluation metrics and effectively upgrades the performance of the instance segmentation method.