Multiple object tracking (MOT) from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms requires efficient motion modeling. This is because UAV-MOT faces both local object motion and global camera motion. Motion blur also increases the difficulty of detecting large moving objects. Previous UAV motion modeling approaches either focus only on local motion or ignore motion blurring effects, thus limiting their tracking performance and speed. To address these issues, we propose the Motion Mamba Module, which explores both local and global motion features through cross-correlation and bi-directional Mamba Modules for better motion modeling. To address the detection difficulties caused by motion blur, we also design motion margin loss to effectively improve the detection accuracy of motion blurred objects. Based on the Motion Mamba module and motion margin loss, our proposed MM-Tracker surpasses the state-of-the-art in two widely open-source UAV-MOT datasets. Code will be available.
The rise of large foundation models, trained on extensive datasets, is revolutionizing the field of AI. Models such as SAM, DALL-E2, and GPT-4 showcase their adaptability by extracting intricate patterns and performing effectively across diverse tasks, thereby serving as potent building blocks for a wide range of AI applications. Autonomous driving, a vibrant front in AI applications, remains challenged by the lack of dedicated vision foundation models (VFMs). The scarcity of comprehensive training data, the need for multi-sensor integration, and the diverse task-specific architectures pose significant obstacles to the development of VFMs in this field. This paper delves into the critical challenge of forging VFMs tailored specifically for autonomous driving, while also outlining future directions. Through a systematic analysis of over 250 papers, we dissect essential techniques for VFM development, including data preparation, pre-training strategies, and downstream task adaptation. Moreover, we explore key advancements such as NeRF, diffusion models, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and world models, presenting a comprehensive roadmap for future research. To empower researchers, we have built and maintained //github.com/zhanghm1995/Forge_VFM4AD, an open-access repository constantly updated with the latest advancements in forging VFMs for autonomous driving.
Multi-modal fusion is a fundamental task for the perception of an autonomous driving system, which has recently intrigued many researchers. However, achieving a rather good performance is not an easy task due to the noisy raw data, underutilized information, and the misalignment of multi-modal sensors. In this paper, we provide a literature review of the existing multi-modal-based methods for perception tasks in autonomous driving. Generally, we make a detailed analysis including over 50 papers leveraging perception sensors including LiDAR and camera trying to solve object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Different from traditional fusion methodology for categorizing fusion models, we propose an innovative way that divides them into two major classes, four minor classes by a more reasonable taxonomy in the view of the fusion stage. Moreover, we dive deep into the current fusion methods, focusing on the remaining problems and open-up discussions on the potential research opportunities. In conclusion, what we expect to do in this paper is to present a new taxonomy of multi-modal fusion methods for the autonomous driving perception tasks and provoke thoughts of the fusion-based techniques in the future.
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.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of situational awareness in military defense applications. With the growing use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs), MOT methods for aerial surveillance is in high demand. Application of MOT in UAS presents specific challenges such as moving sensor, changing zoom levels, dynamic background, illumination changes, obscurations and small objects. In this work, we present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations. We propose a kinematic prediction model, called Deep Extended Kalman Filter (DeepEKF), in which a sequence-to-sequence architecture is used to predict entity trajectories in latent space. DeepEKF utilizes a learned image embedding along with an attention mechanism trained to weight the importance of areas in an image to predict future states. For the visual scoring, we experiment with different similarity measures to calculate distance based on entity appearances, including a convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder, pre-trained using Siamese networks. In initial evaluation experiments, we show that our method, combining scoring structure of the kinematic and visual models within a MHT framework, has improved performance especially in edge cases where entity motion is unpredictable, or the data presents frames with significant gaps.
The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been gaining momentum in recent years owing to technological advances and a significant reduction in their cost. UAV technology can be used in a wide range of domains, including communication, agriculture, security, and transportation. It may be useful to group the UAVs into clusters/flocks in certain domains, and various challenges associated with UAV usage can be alleviated by clustering. Several computational challenges arise in UAV flock management, which can be solved by using machine learning (ML) methods. In this survey, we describe the basic terms relating to UAVS and modern ML methods, and we provide an overview of related tutorials and surveys. We subsequently consider the different challenges that appear in UAV flocks. For each issue, we survey several machine learning-based methods that have been suggested in the literature to handle the associated challenges. Thereafter, we describe various open issues in which ML can be applied to solve the different challenges of flocks, and we suggest means of using ML methods for this purpose. This comprehensive review may be useful for both researchers and developers in providing a wide view of various aspects of state-of-the-art ML technologies that are applicable to flock management.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
Most existing event extraction (EE) methods merely extract event arguments within the sentence scope. However, such sentence-level EE methods struggle to handle soaring amounts of documents from emerging applications, such as finance, legislation, health, etc., where event arguments always scatter across different sentences, and even multiple such event mentions frequently co-exist in the same document. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end model, Doc2EDAG, which can generate an entity-based directed acyclic graph to fulfill the document-level EE (DEE) effectively. Moreover, we reformalize a DEE task with the no-trigger-words design to ease the document-level event labeling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Doc2EDAG, we build a large-scale real-world dataset consisting of Chinese financial announcements with the challenges mentioned above. Extensive experiments with comprehensive analyses illustrate the superiority of Doc2EDAG over state-of-the-art methods. Data and codes can be found at //github.com/dolphin-zs/Doc2EDAG.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.