In crowd scenarios, predicting trajectories of pedestrians is a complex and challenging task depending on many external factors. The topology of the scene and the interactions between the pedestrians are just some of them. Due to advancements in data-science and data collection technologies deep learning methods have recently become a research hotspot in numerous domains. Therefore, it is not surprising that more and more researchers apply these methods to predict trajectories of pedestrians. This paper compares these relatively new deep learning algorithms with classical knowledge-based models that are widely used to simulate pedestrian dynamics. It provides a comprehensive literature review of both approaches, explores technical and application oriented differences, and addresses open questions as well as future development directions. Our investigations point out that the pertinence of knowledge-based models to predict local trajectories is nowadays questionable because of the high accuracy of the deep learning algorithms. Nevertheless, the ability of deep-learning algorithms for large-scale simulation and the description of collective dynamics remains to be demonstrated. Furthermore, the comparison shows that the combination of both approaches (the hybrid approach) seems to be promising to overcome disadvantages like the missing explainability of the deep learning approach.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
Recent advances in sensor and mobile devices have enabled an unprecedented increase in the availability and collection of urban trajectory data, thus increasing the demand for more efficient ways to manage and analyze the data being produced. In this survey, we comprehensively review recent research trends in trajectory data management, ranging from trajectory pre-processing, storage, common trajectory analytic tools, such as querying spatial-only and spatial-textual trajectory data, and trajectory clustering. We also explore four closely related analytical tasks commonly used with trajectory data in interactive or real-time processing. Deep trajectory learning is also reviewed for the first time. Finally, we outline the essential qualities that a trajectory management system should possess in order to maximize flexibility.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
In recent years, mobile devices have gained increasingly development with stronger computation capability and larger storage. Some of the computation-intensive machine learning and deep learning tasks can now be run on mobile devices. To take advantage of the resources available on mobile devices and preserve users' privacy, the idea of mobile distributed machine learning is proposed. It uses local hardware resources and local data to solve machine learning sub-problems on mobile devices, and only uploads computation results instead of original data to contribute to the optimization of the global model. This architecture can not only relieve computation and storage burden on servers, but also protect the users' sensitive information. Another benefit is the bandwidth reduction, as various kinds of local data can now participate in the training process without being uploaded to the server. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent studies of mobile distributed machine learning. We survey a number of widely-used mobile distributed machine learning methods. We also present an in-depth discussion on the challenges and future directions in this area. We believe that this survey can demonstrate a clear overview of mobile distributed machine learning and provide guidelines on applying mobile distributed machine learning to real applications.
This paper presents a comprehensive survey on vision-based robotic grasping. We concluded four key tasks during robotic grasping, which are object localization, pose estimation, grasp detection and motion planning. In detail, object localization includes object detection and segmentation methods, pose estimation includes RGB-based and RGB-D-based methods, grasp detection includes traditional methods and deep learning-based methods, motion planning includes analytical methods, imitating learning methods, and reinforcement learning methods. Besides, lots of methods accomplish some of the tasks jointly, such as object-detection-combined 6D pose estimation, grasp detection without pose estimation, end-to-end grasp detection, and end-to-end motion planning. These methods are reviewed elaborately in this survey. What's more, related datasets are summarized and comparisons between state-of-the-art methods are given for each task. Challenges about robotic grasping are presented, and future directions in addressing these challenges are also pointed out.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and been employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The recent development of deep learning has enabled RL methods to drive optimal policies for sophisticated and capable agents, which can perform efficiently in these challenging environments. This paper addresses an important aspect of deep RL related to situations that demand multiple agents to communicate and cooperate to solve complex tasks. A survey of different approaches to problems related to multi-agent deep RL (MADRL) is presented, including non-stationarity, partial observability, continuous state and action spaces, multi-agent training schemes, multi-agent transfer learning. The merits and demerits of the reviewed methods will be analyzed and discussed, with their corresponding applications explored. It is envisaged that this review provides insights about various MADRL methods and can lead to future development of more robust and highly useful multi-agent learning methods for solving real-world problems.
To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions. Instead, we can have humans communicate an objective to the agent directly. In this work, we combine two approaches to learning from human feedback: expert demonstrations and trajectory preferences. We train a deep neural network to model the reward function and use its predicted reward to train an DQN-based deep reinforcement learning agent on 9 Atari games. Our approach beats the imitation learning baseline in 7 games and achieves strictly superhuman performance on 2 games without using game rewards. Additionally, we investigate the goodness of fit of the reward model, present some reward hacking problems, and study the effects of noise in the human labels.
The era of big data provides researchers with convenient access to copious data. However, people often have little knowledge about it. The increasing prevalence of big data is challenging the traditional methods of learning causality because they are developed for the cases with limited amount of data and solid prior causal knowledge. This survey aims to close the gap between big data and learning causality with a comprehensive and structured review of traditional and frontier methods and a discussion about some open problems of learning causality. We begin with preliminaries of learning causality. Then we categorize and revisit methods of learning causality for the typical problems and data types. After that, we discuss the connections between learning causality and machine learning. At the end, some open problems are presented to show the great potential of learning causality with data.
This paper addresses the problem of head detection in crowded environments. Our detection is based entirely on the geometric consistency across cameras with overlapping fields of view, and no additional learning process is required. We propose a fully unsupervised method for inferring scene and camera geometry, in contrast to existing algorithms which require specific calibration procedures. Moreover, we avoid relying on the presence of body parts other than heads or on background subtraction, which have limited effectiveness under heavy clutter. We cast the head detection problem as a stereo MRF-based optimization of a dense pedestrian height map, and we introduce a constraint which aligns the height gradient according to the vertical vanishing point direction. We validate the method in an outdoor setting with varying pedestrian density levels. With only three views, our approach is able to detect simultaneously tens of heavily occluded pedestrians across a large, homogeneous area.
Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian's trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.