Viriri, Serestina.Lekola , Bafokeng.2024-11-182024-11-1820242024https://hdl.handle.net/10413/23401Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Road obstacle detection is an important task in autonomous vehicles (AVs) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) as they require real-time operation and high accuracy for safe operation. The mobile nature of the task means that it is carried out in a low-resourced environment where there is a need for an algorithm that achieves both high accuracy and high inference speed while meeting the requirement for lightweight. In this dissertation, an exploration of the effectiveness of the Attention-enhanced YOLO algorithm for the task of road obstacle detection is carried out. Several state-of-the-art attention modules that employ both channel and spatial attention are explored and fused with the YOLOv8 and YOLOv9 algorithms. These enhance feature maps of the network by suppressing non-distinctive features allowing the network to learn from highly distinctive features. The Attention-modified networks are trained and validated on the Kitti and BDD100k datasets which are publicly available. Comparisons are made between the models and the baseline. An improvement from the baseline is seen with the GAM attention achieving an accuracy rate of 93.3% on the Kitti dataset and 71.1% on the BDD100k dataset. The Attention modules generally achieved incremental improvements over the baseline.enDeep learning.Autonomous driving.Automated driving.Kitti dataset.Attention networks.Thesis