Vehicle-to-everything communication system is a strong candidate for improving the driving experience and automotive safety by linking vehicles to wireless networks. To take advantage of the full benefits of vehicle connectivity, it is essential to ensure a stable network connection between roadside unit (RSU) and fast-moving vehicles. Based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF), we develop a vehicle tracking algorithm to enable reliable radio connections. For the vehicle tracking algorithm, we focus on estimating the rapid changes in the beam direction of a high-mobility vehicle while reducing the feedback overhead. Furthermore, we design a beamforming codebook that considers the road layout and RSU. By leveraging the proposed beamforming codebook, vehicles on the road can expect a service quality similar to that of conventional cellular services. Finally, a beamformer selection algorithm is developed to secure sufficient gain for the system's link budget. Numerical results verify that the EKF-based vehicle tracking algorithm and the proposed beamforming structure are more suitable for vehicle-to-infrastructure networks compared to existing schemes.
The popular LSPE($\lambda$) algorithm for policy evaluation is revisited to derive a concentration bound that gives high probability performance guarantees from some time on.
The current electricity networks were not initially designed for the high integration of variable generation technologies. They suffer significant losses due to the combustion of fossil fuels, the long-distance transmission, and distribution of the power to the network. Recently, \emph{prosumers}, both consumers and producers, emerge with the increasing affordability to invest in domestic solar systems. Prosumers may trade within their communities to better manage their demand and supply as well as providing social and economic benefits. In this paper, we explore the use of Blockchain technologies and auction mechanisms to facilitate autonomous peer-to-peer energy trading within microgrids. We design two frameworks that utilize the smart contract functionality in Ethereum and employ the continuous double auction and uniform-price double-sided auction mechanisms, respectively. We validate our design by conducting A/B tests to compare the performance of different frameworks on a real-world dataset. The key characteristics of the two frameworks and several cost analyses are presented for comparison. Our results demonstrate that a P2P trading platform that integrates the blockchain technologies and agent-based systems is promising to complement the current centralized energy grid. We also identify a number of limitations, alternative solutions, and directions for future work.
Planar object tracking is an actively studied problem in vision-based robotic applications. While several benchmarks have been constructed for evaluating state-of-the-art algorithms, there is a lack of video sequences captured in the wild rather than in constrained laboratory environment. In this paper, we present a carefully designed planar object tracking benchmark containing 210 videos of 30 planar objects sampled in the natural environment. In particular, for each object, we shoot seven videos involving various challenging factors, namely scale change, rotation, perspective distortion, motion blur, occlusion, out-of-view, and unconstrained. The ground truth is carefully annotated semi-manually to ensure the quality. Moreover, eleven state-of-the-art algorithms are evaluated on the benchmark using two evaluation metrics, with detailed analysis provided for the evaluation results. We expect the proposed benchmark to benefit future studies on planar object tracking.
We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given distribution, only by observing the reward signals and following feasibility rules. Our model represents a parameterized stochastic policy, and by applying a policy gradient algorithm to optimize its parameters, the trained model produces the solution as a sequence of consecutive actions in real time, without the need to re-train for every new problem instance. On capacitated VRP, our approach outperforms classical heuristics and Google's OR-Tools on medium-sized instances in solution quality with comparable computation time (after training). We demonstrate how our approach can handle problems with split delivery and explore the effect of such deliveries on the solution quality. Our proposed framework can be applied to other variants of the VRP such as the stochastic VRP, and has the potential to be applied more generally to combinatorial optimization problems.
In this paper, a novel image moments based model for shape estimation and tracking of an object moving with a complex trajectory is presented. The camera is assumed to be stationary looking at a moving object. Point features inside the object are sampled as measurements. An ellipsoidal approximation of the shape is assumed as a primitive shape. The shape of an ellipse is estimated using a combination of image moments. Dynamic model of image moments when the object moves under the constant velocity or coordinated turn motion model is derived as a function for the shape estimation of the object. An Unscented Kalman Filter-Interacting Multiple Model (UKF-IMM) filter algorithm is applied to estimate the shape of the object (approximated as an ellipse) and track its position and velocity. A likelihood function based on average log-likelihood is derived for the IMM filter. Simulation results of the proposed UKF-IMM algorithm with the image moments based models are presented that show the estimations of the shape of the object moving in complex trajectories. Comparison results, using intersection over union (IOU), and position and velocity root mean square errors (RMSE) as metrics, with a benchmark algorithm from literature are presented. Results on real image data captured from the quadcopter are also presented.
We present a challenging and realistic novel dataset for evaluating 6-DOF object tracking algorithms. Existing datasets show serious limitations---notably, unrealistic synthetic data, or real data with large fiducial markers---preventing the community from obtaining an accurate picture of the state-of-the-art. Our key contribution is a novel pipeline for acquiring accurate ground truth poses of real objects w.r.t a Kinect V2 sensor by using a commercial motion capture system. A total of 100 calibrated sequences of real objects are acquired in three different scenarios to evaluate the performance of trackers in various scenarios: stability, robustness to occlusion and accuracy during challenging interactions between a person and the object. We conduct an extensive study of a deep 6-DOF tracking architecture and determine a set of optimal parameters. We enhance the architecture and the training methodology to train a 6-DOF tracker that can robustly generalize to objects never seen during training, and demonstrate favorable performance compared to previous approaches trained specifically on the objects to track.
Object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo drastic appearance changes over time. Recently, adaptive correlation filters have been successfully applied to object tracking. However, tracking algorithms relying on highly adaptive correlation filters are prone to drift due to noisy updates. Moreover, as these algorithms do not maintain long-term memory of target appearance, they cannot recover from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or target disappearance in the camera view. In this paper, we propose to learn multiple adaptive correlation filters with both long-term and short-term memory of target appearance for robust object tracking. First, we learn a kernelized correlation filter with an aggressive learning rate for locating target objects precisely. We take into account the appropriate size of surrounding context and the feature representations. Second, we learn a correlation filter over a feature pyramid centered at the estimated target position for predicting scale changes. Third, we learn a complementary correlation filter with a conservative learning rate to maintain long-term memory of target appearance. We use the output responses of this long-term filter to determine if tracking failure occurs. In the case of tracking failures, we apply an incrementally learned detector to recover the target position in a sliding window fashion. Extensive experimental results on large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.
In this paper, we propose a new long video dataset (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and benchmark for visual object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 videos from real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect realistic real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long sequences and (b) the accuracy of most trackers abruptly drops on challenging long sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction of long term tracking.
Discrete correlation filter (DCF) based trackers have shown considerable success in visual object tracking. These trackers often make use of low to mid level features such as histogram of gradients (HoG) and mid-layer activations from convolution neural networks (CNNs). We argue that including semantically higher level information to the tracked features may provide further robustness to challenging cases such as viewpoint changes. Deep salient object detection is one example of such high level features, as it make use of semantic information to highlight the important regions in the given scene. In this work, we propose an improvement over DCF based trackers by combining saliency based and other features based filter responses. This combination is performed with an adaptive weight on the saliency based filter responses, which is automatically selected according to the temporal consistency of visual saliency. We show that our method consistently improves a baseline DCF based tracker especially in challenging cases and performs superior to the state-of-the-art. Our improved tracker operates at 9.3 fps, introducing a small computational burden over the baseline which operates at 11 fps.
Current convolutional neural networks algorithms for video object tracking spend the same amount of computation for each object and video frame. However, it is harder to track an object in some frames than others, due to the varying amount of clutter, scene complexity, amount of motion, and object's distinctiveness against its background. We propose a depth-adaptive convolutional Siamese network that performs video tracking adaptively at multiple neural network depths. Parametric gating functions are trained to control the depth of the convolutional feature extractor by minimizing a joint loss of computational cost and tracking error. Our network achieves accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art on the VOT2016 benchmark. Furthermore, our adaptive depth computation achieves higher accuracy for a given computational cost than traditional fixed-structure neural networks. The presented framework extends to other tasks that use convolutional neural networks and enables trading speed for accuracy at runtime.