Introduction

This repository contains code for the following Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) project:

Development and Performance Testing of a LAARMA---Large Animal Activated Roadside Monitoring and Alert System

The project report can be accessed for free soon.

Contact: msha3421, Hommus

Tested system hardware

Sensors:

• Wider-Angle RGB Cam
  • Body: Lucid Vision TDR054S-CC
  • Lens: Edmund Optics 12 mm FoV 41.4 deg @ 2/3" sensor format
  • IP67 Lens Tube: Lucid Vision IPTC-D355L299
• Telephoto RGB Cam
  • Body: Lucid Vision TDR054S-CC
  • Lens: Edmund Optics 50 mm FoV 10 deg @ 2/3" sensor format
  • IP67 Lens Tube: Lucid Vision IPTC-D440L685
• Thermal Cam
  • Body + Lens: FLIR A68, Model: 11302-0101, FoV 24 deg
  • IP67 Enclosure: autoVimation Salamander S with Germanium window
• LiDAR
  • Body: Neuvition Titan M1-R

Edge Computer:

• Main Unit: NVIDIA Orin 64GB Dev Kit
• Accessory: Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD

Network:

• Router: Teltonika RUTX11
• Switch: QNAP QSW-2104-2T

Note: Users need to provide a data SIM card for 4G connection if remote access is required.

Tested software environment

• JetPack version: 5.1.2 (L4T 35.4.1)

Install

Build docker image locally

After git clone this repositry to the Orin.

cd rads_docker
./build.sh

Auto Install

Before install, make sure the SSD is mounted under /mnt/ssd for data logging.

autoinstall/install.sh

The script will automatically set up the software environment within the Orin and the systemd service sensors.

Note: Users need to set up Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 or equivalent cloud storage for storing logged data.

Software Components

The service runs a few software components:

• Multiple image processing pipelines. Each pipeline captures images from a camera as input and performs basic image manipulation techniques, including cropping and resizing, before feeding them into the YOLOv8 object detector to generate animal detection results.

• Event triggering pipeline, which takes the YOLOv8 detection results as input, performs signal filtering, and aggregates the outcomes to trigger the final detection events. The raw detection results are often noisy, containing missed detections and false positives, which necessitate proper signal filtering. In this pipeline, independent Bayesian filters are employed for each object detection input channel. Eventually, the filtered signals are fused to trigger a detection event, which is then connected to the event-triggered data logging and the roadside variable message display.

• Continuous data logging (mp4 and mcap files) and event-triggered data logging (mcap files). The data logging folders are under /mnt/ssd/logging.

• RTSP stream of the camera images for quick live previews through rtsp://<orin_ip_address>:1000/cameras.

Details can be found in the project report.

Note: If users want to use other camera models, they need to prepare their ROS2 drivers and update the corresponding ROS2 launch files under autoinstall/custom/launch/camera_*_pipe.launch.py to let the drivers interface with the downstream components in the image processing pipeline.

Tools

Deploy New YOLOv8 Models

When new YOLOv8 models (pt files) have been trained up using the self-training machine learning pipeline [Link to repo], they need to be converted to TensorRT engines for field deployment.

Example: To deploy a new model yolov8m_cass_new.pt

• Step 1: On Ubuntu PC:

pip install ultralytics
yolo export model=yolov8m_cass_new.pt format=onnx imgsz=480,640

• Step 2: On Orin:

/usr/src/tensorrt/bin/trtexec --onnx=yolov8m_cass_new.onnx --saveEngine=yolov8m_cass_new.engine --fp16

Move the converted engine file to /mnt/ssd/ml/yolov8/ and in the configuration file autoinstall/custom/config/img_yolo_params.yaml, update engine_file_path to point to the path of the new model: '/mnt/ssd/ml/yolov8/yolov8m_cass_new.engine'.

Logged Data Extraction

The continuous data logging operates as long as the system is running, providing low frame rate sensory data for

• model training, validation, and testing using the proposed self-training pipeline, and
• providing ground truth for system evaluation after human inspection.

The recorded mp4 files are uploaded automatically to AWS on an hourly basis through 4G connection.

The recorded bags are selectively tagged and transferred to AWS, as shown in an example below.

Example:

Step 1: Scan bags with detection labels:

• To scan bags within one day:

cd autoinstall/tools/tagger
./auto_bag_tagger.sh 240618

• To scan 10 days:

./auto_bag_tagger.sh 24061

• To scan a whole month:

./auto_bag_tagger.sh 2406

The scanning may take a few hours depending on the date range. The scan results are saved in /mnt/ssd/logging/tagged_bags_2406.txt.

Step 2: Push tagged bags to cloud:

cd autoinstall/tools/sync
cat /mnt/ssd/logging/tagged_bags_2406.txt | ./sync_bags.sh