A Bayesian Approach to Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Based Vehicular Control

Zahra Gharaee, Karl Holmquist, Linbo He, Michael Felsberg

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

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In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are pre-processed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Step DDPG for Deep Reinforcement Learning

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Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving by Transferring Visual Features

Hongli Zhou, Guanwen Zhang, Wei Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving by Transferring Visual Features

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Competitive Card Games

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Learning for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning in Mobile Robots Using 3D Environment Scenarios

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Auto-TLDR; Attention Value Decomposition Network for Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Navigation Policies on Real World Observations using Real World Images and Sensor and Actuation Noise

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Auto-TLDR; Auxiliary Task Aided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Environment Exploration by Autonomous Robots

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Auto-TLDR; meta-learning for learning parametric loss functions that generalize across different tasks and model architectures

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Auto-TLDR; Reinforcement Learning for Healthy Daily Life

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Auto-TLDR; Vacant Space Detection via Semantic Consistency Learning

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Auto-TLDR; Real-Time, Vision-Only Lane Identification Using Monocular Camera

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Auto-TLDR; Exploring a Photorealistic Environment for Explanation and Navigation

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Embodied AI has been recently gaining attention as it aims to foster the development of autonomous and intelligent agents. In this paper, we devise a novel embodied setting in which an agent needs to explore a previously unknown environment while recounting what it sees during the path. In this context, the agent needs to navigate the environment driven by an exploration goal, select proper moments for description, and output natural language descriptions of relevant objects and scenes. Our model integrates a novel self-supervised exploration module with penalty, and a fully-attentive captioning model for explanation. Also, we investigate different policies for selecting proper moments for explanation, driven by information coming from both the environment and the navigation. Experiments are conducted on photorealistic environments from the Matterport3D dataset and investigate the navigation and explanation capabilities of the agent as well as the role of their interactions.

Multiple Future Prediction Leveraging Synthetic Trajectories

Lorenzo Berlincioni, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

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Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Trajectory Prediction using Markov Chains

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Auto-TLDR; Fused Multi-Sensory Data for Stop Lines Detection in Intersection Scenarios

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ActionSpotter: Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Temporal Action Spotting in Videos

Guillaume Vaudaux-Ruth, Adrien Chan-Hon-Tong, Catherine Achard

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Auto-TLDR; ActionSpotter: A Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Action Spotting in Video

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Action spotting has recently been proposed as an alternative to action detection and key frame extraction. However, the current state-of-the-art method of action spotting requires an expensive ground truth composed of the search sequences employed by human annotators spotting actions - a critical limitation. In this article, we propose to use a reinforcement learning algorithm to perform efficient action spotting using only the temporal segments from the action detection annotations, thus opening an interesting solution for video understanding. Experiments performed on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets show that the proposed method, named ActionSpotter, leads to good results and outperforms state-of-the-art detection outputs redrawn for this application. In particular, the spotting mean Average Precision on THUMOS14 is significantly improved from 59.7% to 65.6% while skipping 23% of video.

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Jyri Sakari Maanpää, Josef Taher, Petri Manninen, Leo Pakola, Iaroslav Melekhov, Juha Hyyppä

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Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Learning for Autonomous Steering in Adverse Road and Weather Conditions with Lidar Data

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Detecting and Adapting to Crisis Pattern with Context Based Deep Reinforcement Learning

Eric Benhamou, David Saltiel Saltiel, Jean-Jacques Ohana Ohana, Jamal Atif Atif

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Reinforcement Learning for Financial Crisis Detection and Dis-Investment

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A Novel Actor Dual-Critic Model for Remote Sensing Image Captioning

Ruchika Chavhan, Biplab Banerjee, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Subhasis Chaudhuri

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Auto-TLDR; Actor Dual-Critic Training for Remote Sensing Image Captioning Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

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Improving Robotic Grasping on Monocular Images Via Multi-Task Learning and Positional Loss

William Prew, Toby Breckon, Magnus Bordewich, Ulrik Beierholm

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Auto-TLDR; Improving grasping performance from monocularcolour images in an end-to-end CNN architecture with multi-task learning

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In this paper we introduce two methods of improv-ing real-time objecting grasping performance from monocularcolour images in an end-to-end CNN architecture. The first isthe addition of an auxiliary task during model training (multi-task learning). Our multi-task CNN model improves graspingperformance from a baseline average of 72.04% to 78.14% onthe large Jacquard grasping dataset when performing a supple-mentary depth reconstruction task. The second is introducinga positional loss function that emphasises loss per pixel forsecondary parameters (gripper angle and width) only on points ofan object where a successful grasp can take place. This increasesperformance from a baseline average of 72.04% to 78.92% aswell as reducing the number of training epochs required. Thesemethods can be also performed in tandem resulting in a furtherperformance increase to 79.12%, while maintaining sufficientinference speed to enable processing at 50FPS

Deep Next-Best-View Planner for Cross-Season Visual Route Classification

Kurauchi Kanya, Kanji Tanaka

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Auto-TLDR; Active Visual Place Recognition using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

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Trajectory Representation Learning for Multi-Task NMRDP Planning

Firas Jarboui, Vianney Perchet

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Auto-TLDR; Exploring Non Markovian Reward Decision Processes for Reinforcement Learning

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Expanding Non Markovian Reward Decision Processes (NMRDP) into Markov Decision Processes (MDP) enables the use of state of the art Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to identify optimal policies. In this paper an approach to exploring NMRDPs and expanding them into MDPs, without the prior knowledge of the reward structure, is proposed. The non Markovianity of the reward function is disentangled under the assumption that sets of similar and dissimilar trajectory batches can be sampled. More precisely, within the same batch, measuring the similarity between any couple of trajectories is permitted, although comparing trajectories from different batches is not possible. A modified version of the triplet loss is optimised to construct a representation of the trajectories under which rewards become Markovian.

Visual Object Tracking in Drone Images with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Derya Gözen, Sedat Ozer

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Single Object Tracker for Drone Applications

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There is an increasing demand on utilizing camera equipped drones and their applications in many domains varying from agriculture to entertainment and from sports events to surveillance. In such drone applications, an essential and a common task is tracking an object of interest visually. Drone (or UAV) images have different properties when compared to the ground taken (natural) images and those differences introduce additional complexities to the existing object trackers to be directly applied on drone applications. Some important differences among those complexities include (i) smaller object sizes to be tracked and (ii) different orientations and viewing angles yielding different texture and features to be observed. Therefore, new algorithms trained on drone images are needed for the drone-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based single object tracker that tracks an object of interest in drone images by estimating a series of actions to find the location of the object in the next frame. This is the first work introducing a single object tracker using a deep RL-based technique for drone images. Our proposed solution introduces a novel reward function that aims to reduce the total number of actions taken to estimate the object's location in the next frame and also introduces a different backbone network to be used on low resolution images. Additionally, we introduce a set of new actions into the action library to better deal with the above-mentioned complexities. We compare our proposed solutions to a state of the art tracking algorithm from the recent literature and demonstrate up to 3.87\% improvement in precision and 3.6\% improvement in IoU values on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We also provide additional results on OTB-100 dataset and show up to 3.15\% improvement in precision on the OTB-100 dataset when compared to the same previous state of the art algorithm. Lastly, we analyze the ability to handle some of the challenges faced during tracking, including but not limited to occlusion, deformation, and scale variation for our proposed solutions.

Visual Prediction of Driver Behavior in Shared Road Areas

Peter Gawronski, Darius Burschka

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Auto-TLDR; Predicting Vehicle Behavior in Shared Road Segment Intersections Using Topological Knowledge

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We propose a framework to analyze and predict vehicles behavior within shared road segments like intersections or at narrow passages. The system first identifies critical interaction regions based on topological knowledge. It then checks possible colliding trajectories from the current state of vehicles in the scene, defined by overlapping occupation times in road segments. For each possible interaction area, it analyzes the behavioral profile of both vehicles. Depending on right of way and (unpredictable) behavior parameters, different outcomes are expected and will be tested against input. The interaction between vehicles is analyzed over a short time horizon based on an initial action from one vehicle and the reaction by the other. The vehicle to yield most often performs the first action and the response of the opponent vehicle is measured after a reaction time. The observed reaction is classified by attention, if there was a reaction at all, and the collaboration of the opponent vehicle, whether it helps to resolve the situation or hinders it. The output is a classification of behavior of involved vehicles in terms of active participation in the interaction and assertiveness of driving style in terms of collaborative or disruptive behavior. The additional knowledge is used to refine the prediction of intention and outcome of a scene, which is then compared to the current status to catch unexpected behavior. The applicability of the concept and ideas of the approach is validated on scenarios from the recent Intersection Drone (inD) data set.

AOAM: Automatic Optimization of Adjacency Matrix for Graph Convolutional Network

Yuhang Zhang, Hongshuai Ren, Jiexia Ye, Xitong Gao, Yang Wang, Kejiang Ye, Cheng-Zhong Xu

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Auto-TLDR; Adjacency Matrix for Graph Convolutional Network in Non-Euclidean Space

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Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is adopted to tackle the problem of the convolution operation in non-Euclidean space. Although previous works on GCN have made some progress, one of their limitations is that their input Adjacency Matrix (AM) is designed manually and requires domain knowledge, which is cumbersome, tedious and error-prone. In addition, entries of this fixed Adjacency Matrix are generally designed as binary values (i.e., ones and zeros) which can not reflect more complex relationship between nodes. However, many applications require a weighted and dynamic Adjacency Matrix instead of an unweighted and fixed Adjacency Matrix. To this end, there are few works focusing on designing a more flexible Adjacency Matrix. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end algorithm to improve the GCN performance by focusing on the Adjacency Matrix. We first provide a calculation method that called node information entropy to update the matrix. Then, we analyze the search strategy in a continuous space and introduce the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method to overcome the demerit of the discrete space search. Finally, we integrate the GCN and reinforcement learning into an end-to-end framework. Our method can automatically define the adjacency matrix without artificial knowledge. At the same time, the proposed approach can deal with any size of the matrix and provide a better value for the network. Four popular datasets are selected to evaluate the capability of our algorithm. The method in this paper achieves the state-of-the-art performance on Cora and Pubmed datasets, respectively, with the accuracy of 84.6% and 81.6%.

Self-Play or Group Practice: Learning to Play Alternating Markov Game in Multi-Agent System

Chin-Wing Leung, Shuyue Hu, Ho-Fung Leung

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Auto-TLDR; Group Practice for Deep Reinforcement Learning

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The research in reinforcement learning has achieved great success in strategic game playing. These successes are thanks to the incorporation of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to the agent trained under the self-play (SP) environment. By self-play, agents are provided with an incrementally more difficult curriculum which in turn facilitate learning. However, recent research suggests that agents trained via self-play may easily lead to getting stuck in local equilibria. In this paper, we consider a population of agents each independently learns to play an alternating Markov game (AMG). We propose a new training framework---group practice---for a population of decentralized RL agents. By group practice (GP), agents are assigned into multiple learning groups during training, for every episode of games, an agent is randomly paired up and practices with another agent in the learning group. The convergence result to the optimal value function and the Nash equilibrium are proved under the GP framework. Experimental study is conducted by applying GP to Q-learning algorithm and the deep Q-learning with Monte-Carlo tree search on the game of Connect Four and the game of Hex. We verify that GP is the more efficient training scheme than SP given the same amount of training. We also show that the learning effectiveness can even be improved when applying local grouping to agents.

A Fine-Grained Dataset and Its Efficient Semantic Segmentation for Unstructured Driving Scenarios

Kai Andreas Metzger, Peter Mortimer, Hans J "Joe" Wuensche

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Auto-TLDR; TAS500: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments

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Research in autonomous driving for unstructured environments suffers from a lack of semantically labeled datasets compared to its urban counterpart. Urban and unstructured outdoor environments are challenging due to the varying lighting and weather conditions during a day and across seasons. In this paper, we introduce TAS500, a novel semantic segmentation dataset for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. TAS500 offers fine-grained vegetation and terrain classes to learn drivable surfaces and natural obstacles in outdoor scenes effectively. We evaluate the performance of modern semantic segmentation models with an additional focus on their efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of fine-grained semantic classes to improve the overall prediction accuracy, especially along the class boundaries. The dataset, code, and pretrained model are available online.

Adaptive Remote Sensing Image Attribute Learning for Active Object Detection

Nuo Xu, Chunlei Huo, Chunhong Pan

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Image Attribute Learning for Active Object Detection

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In recent years, deep learning methods bring incredible progress to the field of object detection. However, in the field of remote sensing image processing, existing methods neglect the relationship between imaging configuration and detection performance, and do not take into account the importance of detection performance feedback for improving image quality. Therefore, detection performance is limited by the passive nature of the conventional object detection framework. In order to solve the above limitations, this paper takes adaptive brightness adjustment and scale adjustment as examples, and proposes an active object detection method based on deep reinforcement learning. The goal of adaptive image attribute learning is to maximize the detection performance. With the help of active object detection and image attribute adjustment strategies, low-quality images can be converted into high-quality images, and the overall performance is improved without retraining the detector.

PolyLaneNet: Lane Estimation Via Deep Polynomial Regression

Talles Torres, Rodrigo Berriel, Thiago Paixão, Claudine Badue, Alberto F. De Souza, Thiago Oliveira-Santos

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Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Lane Detection with Deep Polynomial Regression

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One of the main factors that contributed to the large advances in autonomous driving is the advent of deep learning. For safer self-driving vehicles, one of the problems that has yet to be solved completely is lane detection. Since methods for this task have to work in real time (+30 FPS), they not only have to be effective (i.e., have high accuracy) but they also have to be efficient (i.e., fast). In this work, we present a novel method for lane detection that uses as input an image from a forward-looking camera mounted in the vehicle and outputs polynomials representing each lane marking in the image, via deep polynomial regression. The proposed method is shown to be competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods in the TuSimple dataset, while maintaining its efficiency (115 FPS). Additionally, extensive qualitative results on two additional public datasets are presented, alongside with limitations in the evaluation metrics used by recent works for lane detection. Finally, we provide source code and trained models that allow others to replicate all the results shown in this paper, which is surprisingly rare in state-of-the-art lane detection methods.

Attention Based Coupled Framework for Road and Pothole Segmentation

Shaik Masihullah, Ritu Garg, Prerana Mukherjee, Anupama Ray

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Auto-TLDR; Few Shot Learning for Road and Pothole Segmentation on KITTI and IDD

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In this paper, we propose a novel attention based coupled framework for road and pothole segmentation. In many developing countries as well as in rural areas, the drivable areas are neither well-defined, nor well-maintained. Under such circumstances, an Advance Driver Assistant System (ADAS) is needed to assess the drivable area and alert about the potholes ahead to ensure vehicle safety. Moreover, this information can also be used in structured environments for assessment and maintenance of road health. We demonstrate few shot learning approach for pothole detection to leverage accuracy even with fewer training samples. We report the exhaustive experimental results for road segmentation on KITTI and IDD datasets. We also present pothole segmentation on IDD.

Future Urban Scenes Generation through Vehicles Synthesis

Alessandro Simoni, Luca Bergamini, Andrea Palazzi, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Predicting the Future of an Urban Scene with a Novel View Synthesis Paradigm

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In this work we propose a deep learning pipeline to predict the visual future appearance of an urban scene. Despite recent advances, generating the entire scene in an end-to-end fashion is still far from being achieved. Instead, here we follow a two stages approach, where interpretable information is included in the loop and each actor is modelled independently. We leverage a per-object novel view synthesis paradigm; i.e. generating a synthetic representation of an object undergoing a geometrical roto-translation in the 3D space. Our model can be easily conditioned with constraints (e.g. input trajectories) provided by state-of-the-art tracking methods or by the user itself. This allows us to generate a set of diverse realistic futures starting from the same input in a multi-modal fashion. We visually and quantitatively show the superiority of this approach over traditional end-to-end scene-generation methods on CityFlow, a challenging real world dataset.

RLST: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Scene Text Detection Refinement

Xuan Peng, Zheng Huang, Kai Chen, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu

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Auto-TLDR; Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision for Scene Text Detection using Reinforcement Learning

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Within the research of scene text detection, some previous work has already achieved significant accuracy and efficiency. However, most of the work was generally done without considering about the implicit relationship between detection and eye movements. In this paper, we propose a new method for scene text detection especially for its refinement based on reinforcement learning. The idea of this method is inspired by Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision. A saccade makes it possible for humans to orient the gaze to the location where a visual object has appeared. Peripheral vision gathers visual information of surroundings which provides supplement to foveal vision during gazing. We propose a simple pipeline, imitating the way human eyes do a saccade and collect peripheral information, to locate scene text roughly and to refine multi-scale vision field iteratively using reinforcement learning. For both training and evaluation, we use ICDAR2015 Challenge 4 dataset as a base and design several criteria to measure the feasibility of our work.

DeepBEV: A Conditional Adversarial Network for Bird’s Eye View Generation

Helmi Fraser, Sen Wang

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Auto-TLDR; A Generative Adversarial Network for Semantic Object Representation in Autonomous Vehicles

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Obtaining a meaningful, interpretable yet compact representation of the immediate surroundings of an autonomous vehicle is paramount for effective operation as well as safety. This paper proposes a solution to this by representing semantically important objects from a top-down, ego-centric bird's eye view. The novelty in this work is from formulating this problem as an adversarial learning task, tasking a generator model to produce bird's eye view representations which are plausible enough to be mistaken as a ground truth sample. This is achieved by using a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network based model conditioned on object detections from monocular RGB images and the corresponding bounding boxes. Extensive experiments show our model is more robust to novel data compared to strictly supervised benchmark models, while being a fraction of the size of the next best.

Vehicle Lane Merge Visual Benchmark

Kai Cordes, Hellward Broszio

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Auto-TLDR; A Benchmark for Automated Cooperative Maneuvering Using Multi-view Video Streams and Ground Truth Vehicle Description

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Automated driving is regarded as the most promising technology for improving road safety in the future. In this context, connected vehicles have an important role regarding their ability to perform cooperative maneuvers for challenging traffic situations. We propose a benchmark for automated cooperative maneuvers. The targeted cooperative maneuver is the vehicle lane merge where a vehicle on the acceleration lane merges into the traffic of a motorway. The benchmark enables the evaluation of vehicle localization approaches as well as the study of cooperative maneuvers. It consists of temporally synchronized multi-view video streams, highly accurate camera calibration, and ground truth vehicle descriptions, including position, heading, speed, and shape. For benchmark generation, the lane merge maneuver is performed by human drivers on a test track, resulting in 120 lane merge data sets with various traffic situations and video recording conditions.

Quantifying the Use of Domain Randomization

Mohammad Ani, Hector Basevi, Ales Leonardis

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Auto-TLDR; Evaluating Domain Randomization for Synthetic Image Generation by directly measuring the difference between realistic and synthetic data distributions

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Synthetic image generation provides the ability to efficiently produce large quantities of labeled data, which addresses both the data volume requirements of state-of-the-art vision systems and the expense of manually labeling data. However, systems trained on synthetic data typically under-perform systems trained on realistic data due to mismatch between the synthetic and realistic data distributions. Domain Randomization (DR) is a method of broadening a synthetic data distribution to encompass a realistic data distribution, and so provide better performance, when the exact characteristics of the realistic data distribution are not known or cannot be simulated. However, there is no consensus in the literature on the best method of performing DR. We propose a novel method of ranking DR methods by directly measuring the difference between realistic and DR data distributions. This avoids the need to measure task-specific performance and the associated expense of training and evaluation. We compare different methods for measuring distribution differences including the Wasserstein, and Fr\'echet Inception distances. We also examine the effect of performing this evaluation directly on images, and on features generated by an image classification backbone. Finally, we show that the ranking generated by our method is reflected in actual task performance.

SAILenv: Learning in Virtual Visual Environments Made Simple

Enrico Meloni, Luca Pasqualini, Matteo Tiezzi, Marco Gori, Stefano Melacci

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Auto-TLDR; SAILenv: A Simple and Customized Platform for Visual Recognition in Virtual 3D Environment

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Recently, researchers in Machine Learning algorithms, Computer Vision scientists, engineers and others, showed a growing interest in 3D simulators as a mean to artificially create experimental settings that are very close to those in the real world. However, most of the existing platforms to interface algorithms with 3D environments are often designed to setup navigation-related experiments, to study physical interactions, or to handle ad-hoc cases that are not thought to be customized, sometimes lacking a strong photorealistic appearance and an easy-to-use software interface. In this paper, we present a novel platform, SAILenv, that is specifically designed to be simple and customizable, and that allows researchers to experiment visual recognition in virtual 3D scenes. A few lines of code are needed to interface every algorithm with the virtual world, and non-3D-graphics experts can easily customize the 3D environment itself, exploiting a collection of photorealistic objects. Our framework yields pixel-level semantic and instance labeling, depth, and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the only one that provides motion-related information directly inherited from the 3D engine. The client-server communication operates at a low level, avoiding the overhead of HTTP-based data exchanges. We perform experiments using a state-of-the-art object detector trained on real-world images, showing that it is able to recognize the photorealistic 3D objects of our environment. The computational burden of the optical flow compares favourably with the estimation performed using modern GPU-based convolutional networks or more classic implementations. We believe that the scientific community will benefit from the easiness and high-quality of our framework to evaluate newly proposed algorithms in their own customized realistic conditions.

Improving Visual Question Answering Using Active Perception on Static Images

Theodoros Bozinis, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas

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Auto-TLDR; Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering with Reinforcement Learning-based Active Perception

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Visual Question Answering (VQA) is one of the most challenging emerging applications of deep learning. Providing powerful attention mechanisms is crucial for VQA, since the model must correctly identify the region of an image that is relevant to the question at hand. However, existing models analyze the input images at a fixed and typically small resolution, often leading to discarding valuable fine-grained details. To overcome this limitation, in this work we propose a reinforcement learning-based active perception approach that works by applying a series of transformation operations on the images (translation, zoom) in order to facilitate answering the question at hand. This allows for performing fine-grained analysis, effectively increasing the resolution at which the models process information. The proposed method is orthogonal to existing attention mechanisms and it can be combined with most existing VQA methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimentally demonstrated on a challenging VQA dataset.

Visual Localization for Autonomous Driving: Mapping the Accurate Location in the City Maze

Dongfang Liu, Yiming Cui, Xiaolei Guo, Wei Ding, Baijian Yang, Yingjie Chen

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Auto-TLDR; Feature Voting for Robust Visual Localization in Urban Settings

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Accurate localization is a foundational capacity, required for autonomous vehicles to accomplish other tasks such as navigation or path planning. It is a common practice for vehicles to use GPS to acquire location information. However, the application of GPS can result in severe challenges when vehicles run within the inner city where different kinds of structures may shadow the GPS signal and lead to inaccurate location results. To address the localization challenges of urban settings, we propose a novel feature voting technique for visual localization. Different from the conventional front-view-based method, our approach employs views from three directions (front, left, and right) and thus significantly improves the robustness of location prediction. In our work, we craft the proposed feature voting method into three state-of-the-art visual localization networks and modify their architectures properly so that they can be applied for vehicular operation. Extensive field test results indicate that our approach can predict location robustly even in challenging inner-city settings. Our research sheds light on using the visual localization approach to help autonomous vehicles to find accurate location information in a city maze, within a desirable time constraint.

Single-Modal Incremental Terrain Clustering from Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Feature Learning

Reina Ishikawa, Ryo Hachiuma, Akiyoshi Kurobe, Hideo Saito

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Variational Autoencoder for Terrain Type Clustering

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The key to an accurate understanding of terrain is to extract the informative features from the multi-modal data obtained from different devices. Sensors, such as RGB cameras, depth sensors, vibration sensors, and microphones, are used as the multi-modal data. Many studies have explored ways to use them, especially in the robotics field. Some papers have successfully introduced single-modal or multi-modal methods. However, in practice, robots can be faced with extreme conditions; microphones do not work well in the crowded scenes, and an RGB camera cannot capture terrains well in the dark. In this paper, we present a novel framework using the multi-modal variational autoencoder and the Gaussian mixture model clustering algorithm on image data and audio data for terrain type clustering. Our method enables the terrain type clustering even if one of the modalities (either image or audio) is missing at the test-time. We evaluated the clustering accuracy with a conventional multi-modal terrain type clustering method and we conducted ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our approach.

Image Sequence Based Cyclist Action Recognition Using Multi-Stream 3D Convolution

Stefan Zernetsch, Steven Schreck, Viktor Kress, Konrad Doll, Bernhard Sick

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Auto-TLDR; 3D-ConvNet: A Multi-stream 3D Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting Cyclists in Real World Traffic Situations

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In this article, we present an approach to detect basic movements of cyclists in real world traffic situations based on image sequences, optical flow (OF) sequences, and past positions using a multi-stream 3D convolutional neural network (3D-ConvNet) architecture. To resolve occlusions of cyclists by other traffic participants or road structures, we use a wide angle stereo camera system mounted at a heavily frequented public intersection. We created a large dataset consisting of 1,639 video sequences containing cyclists, recorded in real world traffic, resulting in over 1.1 million samples. Through modeling the cyclists' behavior by a state machine of basic cyclist movements, our approach takes every situation into account and is not limited to certain scenarios. We compare our method to an approach solely based on position sequences. Both methods are evaluated taking into account frame wise and scene wise classification results of basic movements, and detection times of basic movement transitions, where our approach outperforms the position based approach by producing more reliable detections with shorter detection times. Our code and parts of our dataset are made publicly available.

RONELD: Robust Neural Network Output Enhancement for Active Lane Detection

Zhe Ming Chng, Joseph Mun Hung Lew, Jimmy Addison Lee

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Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Robust Neural Network Output Enhancement for Active Lane Detection

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Accurate lane detection is critical for navigation in autonomous vehicles, particularly the active lane which demarcates the single road space that the vehicle is currently traveling on. Recent state-of-the-art lane detection algorithms utilize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to train deep learning models on popular benchmarks such as TuSimple and CULane. While each of these models works particularly well on train and test inputs obtained from the same dataset, the performance drops significantly on unseen datasets of different environments. In this paper, we present a real-time robust neural network output enhancement for active lane detection (RONELD) method to identify, track, and optimize active lanes from deep learning probability map outputs. We first adaptively extract lane points from the probability map outputs, followed by detecting curved and straight lanes before using weighted least squares linear regression on straight lanes to fix broken lane edges resulting from fragmentation of edge maps in real images. Lastly, we hypothesize true active lanes through tracking preceding frames. Experimental results demonstrate an up to two-fold increase in accuracy using RONELD on cross-dataset validation tests.

Street-Map Based Validation of Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

Laura Von Rueden, Tim Wirtz, Fabian Hueger, Jan David Schneider, Nico Piatkowski, Christian Bauckhage

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Auto-TLDR; Semantic Segmentation Mask Validation Using A-priori Knowledge from Street Maps

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Artificial intelligence for autonomous driving must meet strict requirements on safety and robustness, which motivates the thorough validation of learned models. However, current validation approaches mostly require ground truth data and are thus both cost-intensive and limited in their applicability. We propose to overcome these limitations by a model agnostic validation using a-priori knowledge from street maps. In particular, we show how to validate semantic segmentation masks and demonstrate the potential of our approach using OpenStreetMap. We introduce validation metrics that indicate false positive or negative road segments. Besides the validation approach, we present a method to correct the vehicle's GPS position so that a more accurate localization can be used for the street map based validation. Lastly, we present quantitative results on the Cityscapes dataset indicating that our validation approach can indeed uncover errors in semantic segmentation masks.

DAG-Net: Double Attentive Graph Neural Network for Trajectory Forecasting

Alessio Monti, Alessia Bertugli, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Generative Model for Multi-modal Human Motion Behaviour in Urban Environments

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Understanding human motion behaviour is a critical task for several possible applications like self-driving cars or social robots, and in general for all those settings where an autonomous agent has to navigate inside a human-centric environment. This is non-trivial because human motion is inherently multi-modal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many plausible ways by which people could move in the future. Additionally, people activities are often driven by goals, e.g. reaching particular locations or interacting with the environment. We address both the aforementioned aspects by proposing a new recurrent generative model that considers both single agents’ future goals and interactions between different agents. The model exploits a double attention-based graph neural network to collect information about the mutual influences among different agents and integrates it with data about agents’ possible future objectives. Our proposal is general enough to be applied in different scenarios: the model achieves state-of-the-art results in both urban environments and also in sports applications.

AV-SLAM: Autonomous Vehicle SLAM with Gravity Direction Initialization

Kaan Yilmaz, Baris Suslu, Sohini Roychowdhury, L. Srikar Muppirisetty

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Auto-TLDR; VI-SLAM with AGI: A combination of three SLAM algorithms for autonomous vehicles

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Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms that are aimed at autonomous vehicles (AVs) are required to utilize sensor redundancies specific to AVs and enable accurate, fast and repeatable estimations of pose and path trajectories. In this work, we present a combination of three SLAM algorithms that utilize a different subset of available sensors such as inertial measurement unit (IMU), a gray-scale mono-camera, and a Lidar. Also, we propose a novel acceleration-based gravity direction initialization (AGI) method for the visual-inertial SLAM algorithm. We analyze the SLAM algorithms and initialization methods for pose estimation accuracy, speed of convergence and repeatability on the KITTI odometry sequences. The proposed VI-SLAM with AGI method achieves relative pose errors less than 2\%, convergence in half a minute or less and convergence time variability less than 3s, which makes it preferable for AVs.

Temporal Pulses Driven Spiking Neural Network for Time and Power Efficient Object Recognition in Autonomous Driving

Wei Wang, Shibo Zhou, Jingxi Li, Xiaohua Li, Junsong Yuan, Zhanpeng Jin

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Auto-TLDR; Spiking Neural Network for Real-Time Object Recognition on Temporal LiDAR Pulses

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Accurate real-time object recognition from sensory data has long been a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving. Even though deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in this area, their considerable processing latency, power consumption as well as computational complexity have been challenging issues for real-time autonomous driving applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to address the real-time object recognition problem utilizing spiking neural networks (SNNs). The proposed SNN model works directly with raw temporal LiDAR pulses without the pulse-to-point cloud preprocessing procedure, which can significantly reduce delay and power consumption. Being evaluated on various datasets derived from LiDAR and dynamic vision sensor (DVS), including Sim LiDAR, KITTI, and DVS-barrel, our proposed model has shown remarkable time and power efficiency, while achieving comparable recognition performance as the state-of-the-art methods. This paper highlights the SNN's great potentials in autonomous driving and related applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use SNN to directly perform time and energy efficient object recognition on temporal LiDAR pulses in the setting of autonomous driving.

Towards life-long mapping of dynamic environments using temporal persistence modeling

Georgios Tsamis, Ioannis Kostavelis, Dimitrios Giakoumis, Dimitrios Tzovaras

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Auto-TLDR; Lifelong Mapping for Mobile Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

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The contemporary SLAM mapping systems assume a static environment and build a map that is then used for mobile robot navigation disregarding the dynamic changes in this environment. The paper at hand presents a novel solution for the \emph{lifelong mapping} problem that continually updates a metric map represented as a 2D occupancy grid in large scale indoor environments with movable objects such as people, robots, objects etc. suitable for industrial applications. We formalize each cell's occupancy as a failure analysis problem and contribute temporal persistence modeling (TPM), an algorithm for probabilistic prediction of the time that a cell in an observed location is expected to be ``occupied" or ``empty" given sparse prior observations from a task specific mobile robot. Our work is evaluated in Gazebo simulation environment against the nominal occupancy of cells and the estimated obstacles persistence. We also show that robot navigation with lifelong mapping demands less re-plans and leads to more efficient navigation in highly dynamic environments.

P2D: A Self-Supervised Method for Depth Estimation from Polarimetry

Marc Blanchon, Desire Sidibe, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Daniel Braun, Fabrice Meriaudeau

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Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Regularization for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Monocular depth estimation is a recurring subject in the field of computer vision. Its ability to describe scenes via a depth map while reducing the constraints related to the formulation of perspective geometry tends to favor its use. However, despite the constant improvement of algorithms, most methods exploit only colorimetric information. Consequently, robustness to events to which the modality is not sensitive to, like specularity or transparency, is neglected. In response to this phenomenon, we propose using polarimetry as an input for a self-supervised monodepth network. Therefore, we propose exploiting polarization cues to encourage accurate reconstruction of scenes. Furthermore, we include a term of polarimetric regularization to state-of-the-art method to take specific advantage of the data. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrating that the contribution of this new information as well as an enhanced loss function improves depth estimation results, especially for specular areas.

Map-Based Temporally Consistent Geolocalization through Learning Motion Trajectories

Bing Zha, Alper Yilmaz

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Motion Trajectories for Geolocalization of Object on Topological Map using Recurrent Neural Network

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In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory learning method that exploits motion trajectories on topological map using recurrent neural network for temporally consistent geolocalization of object. Inspired by human's ability to both be aware of distance and direction of self-motion in navigation, our trajectory learning method learns a pattern representation of trajectories encoded as a sequence of distances and turning angles to assist self-localization. We pose the learning process as a conditional sequence prediction problem in which each output locates the object on a traversable edge in a map. Considering the prediction sequence ought to be topologically connected in the graph-structured map, we adopt two different hypotheses generation and elimination strategies to eliminate disconnected sequence prediction. We demonstrate our approach on the KITTI stereo visual odometry dataset which is a city-scale environment. The key benefits of our approach to geolocalization are that 1) we take advantage of powerful sequence modeling ability of recurrent neural network and its robustness to noisy input, 2) only require a map in the form of a graph and 3) simply use an affordable sensor that generates motion trajectory. The experiments show that the motion trajectories can be learned by training an recurrent neural network, and temporally consistent geolocation can be predicted with both of the proposed strategies.