ABC-Net: Semi-Supervised Multimodal GAN-based Engagement Detection using an Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive Model

We present ABC-Net, a novel semi-supervised multimodal GAN framework to detect engagement levels in video conversations based on psychology literature. We use three constructs: behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement, to extract various features that can effectively capture engagement levels. We feed these features to our semi-supervised GAN network that does regression using these latent representations to obtain the corresponding valence and arousal values, which are then categorized into different levels of engagements. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through experiments on the RECOLA database. To evaluate our method, we analyze and compare our performance on RECOLA and report a relative performance improvement of more than 5% over the baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first method to classify engagement based on a multimodal semi-supervised network.

StylePredict: Machine Theory of Mind for Human Driver Behavior From Trajectories

Studies have shown that autonomous vehicles (AVs) behave conservatively in a traffic environment composed of human drivers and do not adapt to local conditions and socio-cultural norms. It is known that socially aware AVs can be designed if there exist a mechanism to understand the behaviors of human drivers. We present a notion of Machine Theory of Mind (M-ToM) to infer the behaviors of human drivers by observing the trajectory of their vehicles. Our M-ToM approach, called StylePredict, is based on trajectory analysis of vehicles, which has been investigated in robotics and computer vision. StylePredict mimics human ToM to infer driver behaviors, or styles, using a computational mapping between the extracted trajectory of a vehicle in traffic and the driver behaviors using graph-theoretic techniques, including spectral analysis and centrality functions. We use StylePredict to analyze driver behavior in different cultures in the USA, China, India, and Singapore, based on traffic density, heterogeneity, and conformity to traffic rules and observe an inverse correlation between longitudinal (overspeeding) and lateral (overtaking, lane-changes) driving styles.

SelfDeco: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Completion in Challenging Indoor Environments

We present a novel algorithm for self-supervised monocular depth completion. Our approach is based on training a neural network that requires only sparse depth measurements and corresponding monocular video sequences without dense depth labels. Our self-supervised algorithm is designed for challenging indoor environments with textureless regions, glossy and transparent surface, non-Lambertian surfaces, moving people, longer and diverse depth ranges and scenes captured by complex ego-motions. Our novel architecture leverages both deep stacks of sparse convolution blocks to extract sparse depth features and pixel-adaptive convolutions to fuse image and depth features. We compare with existing approaches in NYUv2, KITTI and NAVERLABS indoor datasets, and observe 5\:-\:34 \% improvements in root-means-square error (RMSE) reduction.

AES: Autonomous Excavator System for Real-World and Hazardous Environments

Excavators are widely used for material-handling applications in unstructured environments, including mining and construction. The size of the global market of excavators is 44.12 Billion USD in 2018 and is predicted to grow to 63.14 Billion USD by 2026. Operating excavators in a real-world environment can be challenging due to extreme conditions and rock sliding, ground collapse, or exceeding dust. Multiple fatalities and injuries occur each year during excavations. An autonomous excavator that can substitute human operators in these hazardous environments would substantially lower the number of injuries and can improve the overall productivity.

B-GAP: Behavior-Guided Action Prediction for Autonomous Navigation

We present a novel learning algorithm for action prediction and local navigation for autonomous driving. Our approach classifies the driver behavior of other vehicles or road-agents (aggressive or conservative) and takes that into account for decision making and safe driving. We present a behavior-driven simulator that can generate trajectories corresponding to different levels of aggressive behaviors and use our simulator to train a policy using graph convolutional networks. We use a reinforcement learning-based navigation scheme that uses a proximity graph of traffic agents and computes a safe trajectory for the ego-vehicle that accounts for aggressive driver maneuvers such as overtaking, over-speeding, weaving, and sudden lane changes. We have integrated our algorithm with OpenAI gym-based "Highway-Env" simulator and demonstrate the benefits in terms of improved navigation in different scenarios.

ORBBuf: A Robust Buffering Method for Collaborative Visual SLAM

Collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approaches provide a solution for autonomous robots based on embedded devices. On the other hand, visual SLAM systems rely on correlations between visual frames. As a result, the loss of visual frames from an unreliable wireless network can easily damage the results of collaborative visual SLAM systems. From our experiment, a loss of less than 1 second of data can lead to the failure of visual SLAM algorithms. We present a novel buffering method, ORBBuf, to reduce the impact of data loss on collaborative visual SLAM systems. We model the buffering problem into an optimization problem. We use an efficient greedy-like algorithm, and our buffering method drops the frame that results in the least loss to the quality of the SLAM results. We implement our ORBBuf method on ROS, a widely used middleware framework. Through an extensive evaluation on real-world scenarios and tens of gigabytes of datasets, we demonstrate that our ORBBuf method can be applied to different algorithms, different sensor data (both monocular images and stereo images), different scenes (both indoor and outdoor), and different network environments (both WiFi networks and 4G networks). Experimental results show that the network interruptions indeed affect the SLAM results, and our ORBBuf method can reduce the RMSE up to 50 times.

Dynamically Feasible Deep Reinforcement Learning Policy for Robot Navigation in Dense Mobile Crowds

We present a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based policy for mobile robot navigation in dynamic environments that computes dynamically feasible and spatially aware robot velocities. Our method addresses two primary issues associated with the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) and DRL-based navigation policies and solves them by using the benefits of one method to fix the issues of the other. The issues are: 1. DWA not utilizing the time evolution of the environment while choosing velocities from the dynamically feasible velocity set leading to sub-optimal dynamic collision avoidance behaviors, and 2. DRL-based navigation policies computing velocities that often violate the dynamics constraints such as the non-holonomic and acceleration constraints of the robot. Our DRL-based method generates velocities that are dynamically feasible while accounting for the motion of the obstacles in the environment. This is done by embedding the changes in the environment's state in a novel observation space and a reward function formulation that reinforces spatially aware obstacle avoidance maneuvers. We evaluate our method in realistic 3-D simulation and on a real differential drive robot in challenging indoor scenarios with crowds of varying densities. We make comparisons with traditional and current state-of-the-art collision avoidance methods and observe significant improvements in terms of collision rate, number of dynamics constraint violations and smoothness. We also conduct ablation studies to highlight the advantages and explain the rationale behind our observation space construction, reward structure and network architecture.

Multi-Window Data Augmentation Approach for Speech Emotion Recognition

We present a novel, Multi-Window Data Augmentation (MWA-SER) approach for speech emotion recognition. MWA-SER is a unimodal approach that focuses on two key concepts; designing the speech augmentation method to generate additional data samples and building the deep learning models to recognize the underlying emotion of an audio signal. The multi-window augmentation method extracts more audio features from the speech signal by employing multiple window sizes in the audio feature extraction process. We show that our proposed augmentation method, combined with a deep learning model, improves the speech emotion recognition performance. We evaluate the performance of our MWA-SER approach on the IEMOCAP corpus and show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, the proposed system demonstrated 70% and 88% accuracy while recognizing the emotions for the SAVEE and RAVDESS datasets, respectively.

BoMuDA: Boundless Multi-Source Domain Adaptive Segmentation in Unconstrained Environments

We present an unsupervised multi-source domain adaptive semantic segmentation approach in unstructured and unconstrained traffic environments. We propose a novel training strategy that alternates between single-source domain adaptation (DA) and multi-source distillation, and also between setting up an improvised cost function and optimizing it. In each iteration, the single-source DA first learns a neural network on a selected source, which is followed by a multi-source fine-tuning step using the remaining sources. We call this training routine the Alternating-Incremental ("Alt-Inc") algorithm. Furthermore, our approach is also boundless i.e. it can explicitly classify categories that do not belong to the training dataset (as opposed to labeling such objects as "unknown"). We have conducted extensive experiments and ablation studies using the Indian Driving Dataset, CityScapes, Berkeley DeepDrive, GTA V, and the Synscapes datasets, and we show that our unsupervised approach outperforms other unsupervised and semi-supervised SOTA benchmarks by 5.17% - 42.9% with a reduced model size by up to 5.2x.