Real-Time Out of Distribution Detection in 2D Object Detection for Autonomous Cars

The development of autonomous transportation systems represents a critical step toward achieving intelligent and reliable mobility. Ensuring accurate, real-time environmental perception and the robust detection of unexpected or rare events remains a major challenge for autonomous vehicles operating in complex and dynamic environments. To address this, we propose a novel processing pipeline that constructs Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations from raw 3D LiDAR point clouds using both intensity and height map channels, thereby retaining essential geometric and reflective features. On top of these BEV representations, an optimized YOLOv11-based deep learning model is applied for high-precision object detection. A key contribution of our work is the integration of a real-time Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection module, which employs lightweight statistical techniques in conjunction with learned feature representations to ensure minimal computational overhead while maintaining operational robustness. The proposed architecture enables the reliable identification of standard traffic objects as well as the detection of atypical or previously unseen events, such as overturned vehicles or unknown obstacles. Experimental evaluation on representative driving scenarios demonstrates that our method achieves approximately 95% detection accuracy, outperforming conventional baselines in both speed and reliability. Overall, the results highlight the potential of combining state-of-the-art deep neural detection frameworks with efficient, statistically grounded OOD analysis for enhancing the safety and trustworthiness of autonomous vehicle perception systems.