Vision is one of the primary sensing modalities in autonomous driving. In this paper we look at the problem of estimating the velocity of road vehicles from a camera mounted on a moving car. Contrary to prior methods that train end-to-end deep networks that estimate the vehicles' velocity from the video pixels, we propose a two-step approach where first an off-the-shelf tracker is used to extract vehicle bounding boxes and then a small neural network is used to regress the vehicle velocity from the tracked bounding boxes. Surprisingly, we find that this still achieves state-of-the-art estimation performance with the significant benefit of separating perception from dynamics estimation via a clean, interpretable and verifiable interface which allows us distill the statistics which are crucial for velocity estimation. We show that the latter can be used to easily generate synthetic training data in the space of bounding boxes and use this to improve the performance of our method further.
Photometric consistency loss is one of the representative objective functions commonly used for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. However, this loss often causes unstable depth predictions in textureless or occluded regions due to incorrect guidance. Recent self-supervised learning approaches tackle this issue by utilizing feature representations explicitly learned from auto-encoders, expecting better discriminability than the input image. Despite the use of auto-encoded features, we observe that the method does not embed features as discriminative as auto-encoded features. In this paper, we propose residual guidance loss that enables the depth estimation network to embed the discriminative feature by transferring the discriminability of auto-encoded features. We conducted experiments on the KITTI benchmark and verified our method's superiority and orthogonality on other state-of-the-art methods.
6D object pose tracking has been extensively studied in the robotics and computer vision communities. The most promising solutions, leveraging on deep neural networks and/or filtering and optimization, exhibit notable performance on standard benchmarks. However, to our best knowledge, these have not been tested thoroughly against fast object motions. Tracking performance in this scenario degrades significantly, especially for methods that do not achieve real-time performance and introduce non negligible delays. In this work, we introduce ROFT, a Kalman filtering approach for 6D object pose and velocity tracking from a stream of RGB-D images. By leveraging real-time optical flow, ROFT synchronizes delayed outputs of low frame rate Convolutional Neural Networks for instance segmentation and 6D object pose estimation with the RGB-D input stream to achieve fast and precise 6D object pose and velocity tracking. We test our method on a newly introduced photorealistic dataset, Fast-YCB, which comprises fast moving objects from the YCB model set, and on the dataset for object and hand pose estimation HO-3D. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for 6D object pose tracking, while also providing 6D object velocity tracking. A video showing the experiments is provided as supplementary material.
Human pose estimation - the process of recognizing human keypoints in a given image - is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and has a wide range of applications including movement diagnostics, surveillance, or self-driving vehicle. The accuracy of human keypoint prediction is increasingly improved thanks to the burgeoning development of deep learning. Most existing methods solved human pose estimation by generating heatmaps in which the ith heatmap indicates the location confidence of the ith keypoint. In this paper, we introduce novel network structures referred to as multiresolution representation learning for human keypoint prediction. At different resolutions in the learning process, our networks branch off and use extra layers to learn heatmap generation. We firstly consider the architectures for generating the multiresolution heatmaps after obtaining the lowest-resolution feature maps. Our second approach allows learning during the process of feature extraction in which the heatmaps are generated at each resolution of the feature extractor. The first and second approaches are referred to as multi-resolution heatmap learning and multi-resolution feature map learning respectively. Our architectures are simple yet effective, achieving good performance. We conducted experiments on two common benchmarks for human pose estimation: MS-COCO and MPII dataset.
We develop a system for modeling hand-object interactions in 3D from RGB images that show a hand which is holding a novel object from a known category. We design a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Hand-held Object Pose and Shape estimation called HOPS-Net and utilize prior work to estimate the hand pose and configuration. We leverage the insight that information about the hand facilitates object pose and shape estimation by incorporating the hand into both training and inference of the object pose and shape as well as the refinement of the estimated pose. The network is trained on a large synthetic dataset of objects in interaction with a human hand. To bridge the gap between real and synthetic images, we employ an image-to-image translation model (Augmented CycleGAN) that generates realistically textured objects given a synthetic rendering. This provides a scalable way of generating annotated data for training HOPS-Net. Our quantitative experiments show that even noisy hand parameters significantly help object pose and shape estimation. The qualitative experiments show results of pose and shape estimation of objects held by a hand "in the wild".
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
In this work we propose a new method for simultaneous object detection and 6DoF pose estimation. Unlike most recent techniques for CNN-based object detection and pose estimation, we do not base our approach on the common 2D counterparts, i.e. SSD and YOLO, but propose a new scheme. Instead of regressing 2D or 3D bounding boxes, we output full-sized 2D images containing multiclass object masks and dense 2D-3D correspondences. Having them at hand, a 6D pose is computed for each detected object using the PnP algorithm supplemented with RANSAC. This strategy allows for substantially better pose estimates due to a much higher number of relevant pose correspondences. Furthermore, the method is real-time capable, conceptually simple and not bound to any particular detection paradigms, such as R-CNN, SSD or YOLO. We test our method for single- and multiple-object pose estimation and compare the performance with the former state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate how to use our pipeline when only synthetic renderings are available. In both cases, we outperform the former state-of-the-art by a large margin.
3D vehicle detection and tracking from a monocular camera requires detecting and associating vehicles, and estimating their locations and extents together. It is challenging because vehicles are in constant motion and it is practically impossible to recover the 3D positions from a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that jointly detects and tracks 3D vehicle bounding boxes. Our approach leverages 3D pose estimation to learn 2D patch association overtime and uses temporal information from tracking to obtain stable 3D estimation. Our method also leverages 3D box depth ordering and motion to link together the tracks of occluded objects. We train our system on realistic 3D virtual environments, collecting a new diverse, large-scale and densely annotated dataset with accurate 3D trajectory annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that our method benefits from inferring 3D for both data association and tracking robustness, leveraging our dynamic 3D tracking dataset.
We propose an algorithm for real-time 6DOF pose tracking of rigid 3D objects using a monocular RGB camera. The key idea is to derive a region-based cost function using temporally consistent local color histograms. While such region-based cost functions are commonly optimized using first-order gradient descent techniques, we systematically derive a Gauss-Newton optimization scheme which gives rise to drastically faster convergence and highly accurate and robust tracking performance. We furthermore propose a novel complex dataset dedicated for the task of monocular object pose tracking and make it publicly available to the community. To our knowledge, It is the first to address the common and important scenario in which both the camera as well as the objects are moving simultaneously in cluttered scenes. In numerous experiments - including our own proposed data set - we demonstrate that the proposed Gauss-Newton approach outperforms existing approaches, in particular in the presence of cluttered backgrounds, heterogeneous objects and partial occlusions.
Monocular cameras are one of the most commonly used sensors in the automotive industry for autonomous vehicles. One major drawback using a monocular camera is that it only makes observations in the two dimensional image plane and can not directly measure the distance to objects. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by developing a multi-object tracking algorithm that takes an image as input and produces trajectories of detected objects in a world coordinate system. We solve this by using a deep neural network trained to detect and estimate the distance to objects from a single input image. The detections from a sequence of images are fed in to a state-of-the art Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture tracking filter. The combination of the learned detector and the PMBM filter results in an algorithm that achieves 3D tracking using only mono-camera images as input. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated both in 3D world coordinates, and 2D image coordinates, using the publicly available KITTI object tracking dataset. The algorithm shows the ability to accurately track objects, correctly handle data associations, even when there is a big overlap of the objects in the image, and is one of the top performing algorithms on the KITTI object tracking benchmark. Furthermore, the algorithm is efficient, running on average close to 20 frames per second.
Online multi-object tracking (MOT) is extremely important for high-level spatial reasoning and path planning for autonomous and highly-automated vehicles. In this paper, we present a modular framework for tracking multiple objects (vehicles), capable of accepting object proposals from different sensor modalities (vision and range) and a variable number of sensors, to produce continuous object tracks. This work is inspired by traditional tracking-by-detection approaches in computer vision, with some key differences - First, we track objects across multiple cameras and across different sensor modalities. This is done by fusing object proposals across sensors accurately and efficiently. Second, the objects of interest (targets) are tracked directly in the real world. This is a departure from traditional techniques where objects are simply tracked in the image plane. Doing so allows the tracks to be readily used by an autonomous agent for navigation and related tasks. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we test it on real world highway data collected from a heavily sensorized testbed capable of capturing full-surround information. We demonstrate that our framework is well-suited to track objects through entire maneuvers around the ego-vehicle, some of which take more than a few minutes to complete. We also leverage the modularity of our approach by comparing the effects of including/excluding different sensors, changing the total number of sensors, and the quality of object proposals on the final tracking result.