Adverse weather conditions can negatively affect LiDAR-based object detectors. In this work, we focus on the phenomenon of vehicle gas exhaust condensation in cold weather conditions. This everyday effect can influence the estimation of object sizes, orientations and introduce ghost object detections, compromising the reliability of the state of the art object detectors. We propose to solve this problem by using data augmentation and a novel training loss term. To effectively train deep neural networks, a large set of labeled data is needed. In case of adverse weather conditions, this process can be extremely laborious and expensive. We address this issue in two steps: First, we present a gas exhaust data generation method based on 3D surface reconstruction and sampling which allows us to generate large sets of gas exhaust clouds from a small pool of labeled data. Second, we introduce a point cloud augmentation process that can be used to add gas exhaust to datasets recorded in good weather conditions. Finally, we formulate a new training loss term that leverages the augmented point cloud to increase object detection robustness by penalizing predictions that include noise. In contrast to other works, our method can be used with both grid-based and point-based detectors. Moreover, since our approach does not require any network architecture changes, inference times remain unchanged. Experimental results on real data show that our proposed method greatly increases robustness to gas exhaust and noisy data.
The bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation allows robust learning of multiple tasks for autonomous driving including road layout estimation and 3D object detection. However, contemporary methods for unified road layout estimation and 3D object detection rarely handle the class imbalance of the training dataset and multi-class learning to reduce the total number of networks required. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified model for road layout estimation and 3D object detection inspired by the transformer architecture and the CycleGAN learning framework. The proposed model deals with the performance degradation due to the class imbalance of the dataset utilizing the focal loss and the proposed dual cycle loss. Moreover, we set up extensive learning scenarios to study the effect of multi-class learning for road layout estimation in various situations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and the learning scheme, we conduct a thorough ablation study and a comparative study. The experiment results attest the effectiveness of our model; we achieve state-of-the-art performance in both the road layout estimation and 3D object detection tasks.
Neural volumetric representations have shown the potential that MLP networks can be trained with multi-view calibrated images to represent scene geometry and appearance, without explicit 3D supervision. Object segmentation can enrich many downstream applications based on the learned radiance field. However, introducing hand-crafted segmentation to define regions of interest in a complex real-world scene are non-trivial and expensive as it acquires per view annotation. This paper carries out the exploration of self-supervised learning for object segmentation using NeRF for complex real-world scenes. Our framework, NeRF-SOS, couples object segmentation and neural radiance field to segment objects in any view within a scene. By proposing a novel collaborative contrastive loss in both appearance and geometry levels, NeRF-SOS encourages NeRF models to distill compact geometry-aware segmentation clusters from their density fields and the self-supervised pre-trained 2D visual features. The self-supervised object segmentation framework can be applied to various NeRF models that both lead to photo-realistic rendering results and convincing segmentations for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Extensive results on the LLFF, Tank and Temple datasets validate the effectiveness of NeRF-SOS. It consistently surpasses other image-based self-supervised baselines and even captures finer details than supervised Semantic-NeRF.
Tactile recognition of 3D objects remains a challenging task. Compared to 2D shapes, the complex geometry of 3D surfaces requires richer tactile signals, more dexterous actions, and more advanced encoding techniques. In this work, we propose TANDEM3D, a method that applies a co-training framework for exploration and decision making to 3D object recognition with tactile signals. Starting with our previous work, which introduced a co-training paradigm for 2D recognition problems, we introduce a number of advances that enable us to scale up to 3D. TANDEM3D is based on a novel encoder that builds 3D object representation from contact positions and normals using PointNet++. Furthermore, by enabling 6DOF movement, TANDEM3D explores and collects discriminative touch information with high efficiency. Our method is trained entirely in simulation and validated with real-world experiments. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, TANDEM3D achieves higher accuracy and a lower number of actions in recognizing 3D objects and is also shown to be more robust to different types and amounts of sensor noise. Video is available at //jxu.ai/tandem3d.
Obstacle detection is a safety-critical problem in robot navigation, where stereo matching is a popular vision-based approach. While deep neural networks have shown impressive results in computer vision, most of the previous obstacle detection works only leverage traditional stereo matching techniques to meet the computational constraints for real-time feedback. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method that leverages a deep neural network to detect occupancy from stereo images directly. Instead of learning the point cloud correspondence from the stereo data, our approach extracts the compact obstacle distribution based on volumetric representations. In addition, we prune the computation of safety irrelevant spaces in a coarse-to-fine manner based on octrees generated by the decoder. As a result, we achieve real-time performance on the onboard computer (NVIDIA Jetson TX2). Our approach detects obstacles accurately in the range of 32 meters and achieves better IoU (Intersection over Union) and CD (Chamfer Distance) scores with only 2% of the computation cost of the state-of-the-art stereo model. Furthermore, we validate our method's robustness and real-world feasibility through autonomous navigation experiments with a real robot. Hence, our work contributes toward closing the gap between the stereo-based system in robot perception and state-of-the-art stereo models in computer vision. To counter the scarcity of high-quality real-world indoor stereo datasets, we collect a 1.36 hours stereo dataset with a Jackal robot which is used to fine-tune our model. The dataset, the code, and more visualizations are available at //lhy.xyz/stereovoxelnet/
Moving Object Detection (MOD) is a critical vision task for successfully achieving safe autonomous driving. Despite plausible results of deep learning methods, most existing approaches are only frame-based and may fail to reach reasonable performance when dealing with dynamic traffic participants. Recent advances in sensor technologies, especially the Event camera, can naturally complement the conventional camera approach to better model moving objects. However, event-based works often adopt a pre-defined time window for event representation, and simply integrate it to estimate image intensities from events, neglecting much of the rich temporal information from the available asynchronous events. Therefore, from a new perspective, we propose RENet, a novel RGB-Event fusion Network, that jointly exploits the two complementary modalities to achieve more robust MOD under challenging scenarios for autonomous driving. Specifically, we first design a temporal multi-scale aggregation module to fully leverage event frames from both the RGB exposure time and larger intervals. Then we introduce a bi-directional fusion module to attentively calibrate and fuse multi-modal features. To evaluate the performance of our network, we carefully select and annotate a sub-MOD dataset from the commonly used DSEC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art RGB-Event fusion alternatives.
A few lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been recently designed for remote sensing object detection (RSOD). However, most of them simply replace vanilla convolutions with stacked separable convolutions, which may not be efficient due to a lot of precision losses and may not be able to detect oriented bounding boxes (OBB). Also, the existing OBB detection methods are difficult to constrain the shape of objects predicted by CNNs accurately. In this paper, we propose an effective lightweight oriented object detector (LO-Det). Specifically, a channel separation-aggregation (CSA) structure is designed to simplify the complexity of stacked separable convolutions, and a dynamic receptive field (DRF) mechanism is developed to maintain high accuracy by customizing the convolution kernel and its perception range dynamically when reducing the network complexity. The CSA-DRF component optimizes efficiency while maintaining high accuracy. Then, a diagonal support constraint head (DSC-Head) component is designed to detect OBBs and constrain their shapes more accurately and stably. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed LO-Det can run very fast even on embedded devices with the competitive accuracy of detecting oriented objects.
In this paper the current status and open challenges of synthetic speech detection are addressed. The work comprises an initial analysis of available open datasets and of existing detection methods, a description of the requirements for new research datasets compliant with regulations and better representing real-case scenarios, and a discussion of the desired characteristics of future trustworthy detection methods in terms of both functional and non-functional requirements. Compared to other works, based on specific detection solutions or presenting single dataset of synthetic speeches, our paper is meant to orient future state-of-the-art research in the domain, to quickly lessen the current gap between synthesis and detection approaches.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.