Sense4FL: Vehicular Crowdsensing Enhanced Federated Learning for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

To accommodate constantly changing road conditions, real-time vision model training is essential for autonomous driving (AD). Federated learning (FL) serves as a promising paradigm to enable autonomous vehicles to train models collaboratively with their onboard computing resources. However, existing vehicle selection schemes for FL all assume predetermined and location-independent vehicles' datasets, neglecting the fact that vehicles collect training data along their routes, thereby resulting in suboptimal vehicle selection. In this paper, we focus on the fundamental perception problem and propose Sense4FL, a vehicular crowdsensing-enhanced FL framework featuring \textit{trajectory-dependent} vehicular \textit{training data collection} to \rev{improve the object detection quality} in AD for a region. To this end, we first derive the convergence bound of FL by considering the impact of both vehicles' uncertain trajectories and uploading probabilities, from which we discover that minimizing the training loss is equivalent to minimizing a weighted sum of local and global earth mover's distance (EMD) between vehicles' collected data distribution and global data distribution. Based on this observation, we formulate the trajectory-dependent vehicle selection and data collection problem for FL in AD. Given that the problem is NP-hard, we develop an efficient algorithm to find the solution with an approximation guarantee. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in improving object detection performance compared with existing benchmarks.