Design and Evaluation of Object Classifiers for Probabilistic Decision-Making in Autonomous Systems

Abstract

Object classification is a key element that enables effective decision-making in many autonomous systems. A more sophisticated system may also utilize the probability distribution over the classes instead of basing its decision only on the most likely class. This paper introduces new performance metrics: the absolute class error (ACE), expectation of absolute class error (EACE) and variance of absolute class error (VACE) for evaluating the accuracy of such probabilities. We test this metric using different neural network architectures and datasets. Furthermore, we present a new task-based neural network for object classification and compare its performance with a typical probabilistic classification model to show the improvement with threshold-based probabilistic decision-making.