Object detection in state-of-the-art Autonomous Vehicles (AV) framework relies heavily on deep neural networks. Typically, these networks perform object detection uniformly on the entire camera LiDAR frames. However, this uniformity jeopardizes the safety of the AV by giving the same priority to all objects in the scenes regardless of their risk of collision to the AV. In this paper, we present a new end-to-end pipeline for AV that introduces the concept of LiDAR cluster first and camera inference later to detect and classify objects. The benefits of our proposed framework are twofold. First, our pipeline prioritizes detecting objects that pose a higher risk of collision to the AV, giving more time for the AV to react to unsafe conditions. Second, it also provides, on average, faster inference speeds compared to popular deep neural network pipelines. We design our framework using the real-world datasets, the Waymo Open Dataset, solving challenges arising from the limitations of LiDAR sensors and object detection algorithms. We show that our novel object detection pipeline prioritizes the detection of higher risk objects while simultaneously achieving comparable accuracy and a 25% higher average speed compared to camera inference only.
In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system, where a ground node (GN) communicate with a UAV assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the presence of a jammer with imperfect location information. We aim to improve the achievable average rate via the joint robust design of UAV trajectory, IRS passive beamforming and GN's power allocation. However, the formulated optimization problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables. To overcome the difficulty, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by leveraging semidefinite relaxation (SDR), successive convex approximation (SCA), and S-procedure methods. Simulation results show that by deploying the IRS near the GN, our proposed algorithm always improves the uplink achievable average rate significantly compared with the benchmark algorithms, while deploying the IRS nearby the jammer is effective only when the jammer's location is perfectly known.
Moving object detection and segmentation is an essential task in the Autonomous Driving pipeline. Detecting and isolating static and moving components of a vehicle's surroundings are particularly crucial in path planning and localization tasks. This paper proposes a novel real-time architecture for motion segmentation of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. We use three successive scans of LiDAR data in 2D Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation to perform pixel-wise classification as static or moving. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation technique to reduce the significant class imbalance between static and moving objects. We achieve this by artificially synthesizing moving objects by cutting and pasting static vehicles. We demonstrate a low latency of 8 ms on a commonly used automotive embedded platform, namely Nvidia Jetson Xavier. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work directly performing motion segmentation in LiDAR BEV space. We provide quantitative results on the challenging SemanticKITTI dataset, and qualitative results are provided in //youtu.be/2aJ-cL8b0LI.
Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as self-evidencing beings that act to fulfill their optimistic predictions, namely preferred outcomes or goals. In contrast, reinforcement learning requires human-designed rewards to accomplish any desired outcome. Although active inference could provide a more natural self-supervised objective for control, its applicability has been limited because of the shortcomings in scaling the approach to complex environments. In this work, we propose a contrastive objective for active inference that strongly reduces the computational burden in learning the agent's generative model and planning future actions. Our method performs notably better than likelihood-based active inference in image-based tasks, while also being computationally cheaper and easier to train. We compare to reinforcement learning agents that have access to human-designed reward functions, showing that our approach closely matches their performance. Finally, we also show that contrastive methods perform significantly better in the case of distractors in the environment and that our method is able to generalize goals to variations in the background.
Imitation learning enables agents to reuse and adapt the hard-won expertise of others, offering a solution to several key challenges in learning behavior. Although it is easy to observe behavior in the real-world, the underlying actions may not be accessible. We present a new method for imitation solely from observations that achieves comparable performance to experts on challenging continuous control tasks while also exhibiting robustness in the presence of observations unrelated to the task. Our method, which we call FORM (for "Future Observation Reward Model") is derived from an inverse RL objective and imitates using a model of expert behavior learned by generative modelling of the expert's observations, without needing ground truth actions. We show that FORM performs comparably to a strong baseline IRL method (GAIL) on the DeepMind Control Suite benchmark, while outperforming GAIL in the presence of task-irrelevant features.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
Since DARPA Grand Challenges (rural) in 2004/05 and Urban Challenges in 2007, autonomous driving has been the most active field of AI applications. Almost at the same time, deep learning has made breakthrough by several pioneers, three of them (also called fathers of deep learning), Hinton, Bengio and LeCun, won ACM Turin Award in 2019. This is a survey of autonomous driving technologies with deep learning methods. We investigate the major fields of self-driving systems, such as perception, mapping and localization, prediction, planning and control, simulation, V2X and safety etc. Due to the limited space, we focus the analysis on several key areas, i.e. 2D and 3D object detection in perception, depth estimation from cameras, multiple sensor fusion on the data, feature and task level respectively, behavior modelling and prediction of vehicle driving and pedestrian trajectories.
Combining clustering and representation learning is one of the most promising approaches for unsupervised learning of deep neural networks. However, doing so naively leads to ill posed learning problems with degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled learning formulation that addresses these issues. The method is obtained by maximizing the information between labels and input data indices. We show that this criterion extends standard cross-entropy minimization to an optimal transport problem, which we solve efficiently for millions of input images and thousands of labels using a fast variant of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. The resulting method is able to self-label visual data so as to train highly competitive image representations without manual labels. Compared to the best previous method in this class, namely DeepCluster, our formulation minimizes a single objective function for both representation learning and clustering; it also significantly outperforms DeepCluster in standard benchmarks and reaches state of the art for learning a ResNet-50 self-supervisedly.
We propose a 3D object detection method for autonomous driving by fully exploiting the sparse and dense, semantic and geometry information in stereo imagery. Our method, called Stereo R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN for stereo inputs to simultaneously detect and associate object in left and right images. We add extra branches after stereo Region Proposal Network (RPN) to predict sparse keypoints, viewpoints, and object dimensions, which are combined with 2D left-right boxes to calculate a coarse 3D object bounding box. We then recover the accurate 3D bounding box by a region-based photometric alignment using left and right RoIs. Our method does not require depth input and 3D position supervision, however, outperforms all existing fully supervised image-based methods. Experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art stereo-based method by around 30% AP on both 3D detection and 3D localization tasks. Code will be made publicly available.
Safety and decline of road traffic accidents remain important issues of autonomous driving. Statistics show that unintended lane departure is a leading cause of worldwide motor vehicle collisions, making lane detection the most promising and challenge task for self-driving. Today, numerous groups are combining deep learning techniques with computer vision problems to solve self-driving problems. In this paper, a Global Convolution Networks (GCN) model is used to address both classification and localization issues for semantic segmentation of lane. We are using color-based segmentation is presented and the usability of the model is evaluated. A residual-based boundary refinement and Adam optimization is also used to achieve state-of-art performance. As normal cars could not afford GPUs on the car, and training session for a particular road could be shared by several cars. We propose a framework to get it work in real world. We build a real time video transfer system to get video from the car, get the model trained in edge server (which is equipped with GPUs), and send the trained model back to the car.
There is growing interest in object detection in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous robots and vehicles. To enable such innovative systems, we need faster object detection. In this work, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy and speed with domain-specific approximations, i.e. category-aware image size scaling and proposals scaling, for two state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection meta-architectures. We study the effectiveness of applying approximation both statically and dynamically to understand the potential and the applicability of them. By conducting experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset, we show that domain-specific approximation has great potential to improve the speed of the system without deteriorating the accuracy of object detectors, i.e. up to 7.5x speedup for dynamic domain-specific approximation. To this end, we present our insights toward harvesting domain-specific approximation as well as devise a proof-of-concept runtime, AutoFocus, that exploits dynamic domain-specific approximation.