This work leverages neural radiance fields and remote sensing for forestry applications. Here, we show neural radiance fields offer a wide range of possibilities to improve upon existing remote sensing methods in forest monitoring. We present experiments that demonstrate their potential to: (1) express fine features of forest 3D structure, (2) fuse available remote sensing modalities and (3), improve upon 3D structure derived forest metrics. Altogether, these properties make neural fields an attractive computational tool with great potential to further advance the scalability and accuracy of forest monitoring programs.
We study the algorithmic complexity of computing persistent homology of a randomly generated filtration. Specifically, we prove upper bounds for the average fill-in (number of non-zero entries) of the boundary matrix on \v{C}ech, Vietoris--Rips and Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi filtrations after matrix reduction. Our bounds show that the reduced matrix is expected to be significantly sparser than what the general worst-case predicts. Our method is based on previous results on the expected Betti numbers of the corresponding complexes. We establish a link between these results and the fill-in of the boundary matrix. In the $1$-dimensional case, our bound for \v{C}ech and Vietoris--Rips complexes is asymptotically tight up to a logarithmic factor. We also provide an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi filtration realising the worst-case.
We propose two extensions to existing importance sampling based methods for lossy compression. First, we introduce an importance sampling based compression scheme that is a variant of ordered random coding (Theis and Ahmed, 2022) and is amenable to direct evaluation of the achievable compression rate for a finite number of samples. Our second and major contribution is the importance matching lemma, which is a finite proposal counterpart of the recently introduced Poisson matching lemma (Li and Anantharam, 2021). By integrating with deep learning, we provide a new coding scheme for distributed lossy compression with side information at the decoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through experiments involving synthetic Gaussian sources, distributed image compression with MNIST and vertical federated learning with CIFAR-10.
In this work, we introduce DeepIPC, a novel end-to-end model tailored for autonomous driving, which seamlessly integrates perception and control tasks. Unlike traditional models that handle these tasks separately, DeepIPC innovatively combines a perception module, which processes RGBD images for semantic segmentation and generates bird's eye view (BEV) mappings, with a controller module that utilizes these insights along with GNSS and angular speed measurements to accurately predict navigational waypoints. This integration allows DeepIPC to efficiently translate complex environmental data into actionable driving commands. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates DeepIPC's superior performance in terms of drivability and multi-task efficiency across diverse real-world scenarios, setting a new benchmark for end-to-end autonomous driving systems with a leaner model architecture. The experimental results underscore DeepIPC's potential to significantly enhance autonomous vehicular navigation, promising a step forward in the development of autonomous driving technologies. For further insights and replication, we will make our code and datasets available at //github.com/oskarnatan/DeepIPC.
Despite the growth of physically assistive robotics (PAR) research over the last decade, nearly half of PAR user studies do not involve participants with the target disabilities. There are several reasons for this -- recruitment challenges, small sample sizes, and transportation logistics -- all influenced by systemic barriers that people with disabilities face. However, it is well-established that working with end-users results in technology that better addresses their needs and integrates with their lived circumstances. In this paper, we reflect on multiple approaches we have taken to working with people with motor impairments across the design, development, and evaluation of three PAR projects: (a) assistive feeding with a robot arm; (b) assistive teleoperation with a mobile manipulator; and (c) shared control with a robot arm. We discuss these approaches to working with users along three dimensions -- individual vs. community-level insight, logistic burden on end-users vs. researchers, and benefit to researchers vs. community -- and share recommendations for how other PAR researchers can incorporate users into their work.
Introduction: Microblogging websites have massed rich data sources for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In this regard, sentiment classification has frequently proven inefficient because microblog posts typically lack syntactically consistent terms and representatives since users on these social networks do not like to write lengthy statements. Also, there are some limitations to low-resource languages. The Persian language has exceptional characteristics and demands unique annotated data and models for the sentiment analysis task, which are distinctive from text features within the English dialect. Method: This paper first constructs a user opinion dataset called ITRC-Opinion in a collaborative environment and insource way. Our dataset contains 60,000 informal and colloquial Persian texts from social microblogs such as Twitter and Instagram. Second, this study proposes a new architecture based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) model for more effective sentiment analysis of colloquial text in social microblog posts. The constructed datasets are used to evaluate the presented architecture. Furthermore, some models, such as LSTM, CNN-RNN, BiLSTM, and BiGRU with different word embeddings, including Fasttext, Glove, and Word2vec, investigated our dataset and evaluated the results. Results: The results demonstrate the benefit of our dataset and the proposed model (72% accuracy), displaying meaningful improvement in sentiment classification performance.
For robots to perform assistive tasks in unstructured home environments, they must learn and reason on the semantic knowledge of the environments. Despite a resurgence in the development of semantic reasoning architectures, these methods assume that all the training data is available a priori. However, each user's environment is unique and can continue to change over time, which makes these methods unsuitable for personalized home service robots. Although research in continual learning develops methods that can learn and adapt over time, most of these methods are tested in the narrow context of object classification on static image datasets. In this paper, we combine ideas from continual learning, semantic reasoning, and interactive machine learning literature and develop a novel interactive continual learning architecture for continual learning of semantic knowledge in a home environment through human-robot interaction. The architecture builds on core cognitive principles of learning and memory for efficient and real-time learning of new knowledge from humans. We integrate our architecture with a physical mobile manipulator robot and perform extensive system evaluations in a laboratory environment over two months. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture to allow a physical robot to continually adapt to the changes in the environment from limited data provided by the users (experimenters), and use the learned knowledge to perform object fetching tasks.
Current studies on human locomotion focus mainly on solid ground walking conditions. In this paper, we present a biomechanic comparison of human walking locomotion on solid ground and sand. A novel dataset containing 3-dimensional motion and biomechanical data from 20 able-bodied adults for locomotion on solid ground and sand is collected. We present the data collection methods and report the sensor data along with the kinematic and kinetic profiles of joint biomechanics. A comprehensive analysis of human gait and joint stiffness profiles is presented. The kinematic and kinetic analysis reveals that human walking locomotion on sand shows different ground reaction forces and joint torque profiles, compared with those patterns from walking on solid ground. These gait differences reflect that humans adopt motion control strategies for yielding terrain conditions such as sand. The dataset also provides a source of locomotion data for researchers to study human activity recognition and assistive devices for walking on different terrains.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.