Blockchain-Enabled Cross-Domain Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Model Sharing Approach

Object detection for autonomous driving is a huge challenge in the cross-domain adaptation scenario, especially for the time- and resource-consuming task. Distributed deep learning (DDL) has demonstrated a considerably good balance between efficiency and computation complexity. However, the reliability of DDL is low. Moreover, the cost of training data and model is not priced well. In this article, a novel blockchain-enabled model sharing approach is proposed to improve the performance of object detection with cross-domain adaptation for autonomous driving systems. Based on the blockchain and mobile-edge computing (MEC) technology, a domain-adaptive you-only-look-once (YOLOv2) model is trained across nodes, which can reduce significantly the domain discrepancy for different object categories. Furthermore, smart contracts are developed to perform data storage and model sharing tasks efficiently. The reliability of model sharing is ensured with blockchain consensus. We evaluate the proposed method under public data sets. The simulation results demonstrate that the efficiency and reliability of the proposed approach are better than the reference model.