Technical Report for Real-Time Certified Probabilistic Pedestrian Forecasting

The success of autonomous systems will depend upon their ability to safely navigate human-centric environments. This motivates the need for a real-time, probabilistic forecasting algorithm for pedestrians, cyclists, and other agents since these predictions will form a necessary step in assessing the risk of any action. This paper presents a novel approach to probabilistic forecasting for pedestrians based on weighted sums of ordinary differential equations that are learned from historical trajectory information within a fixed scene. The resulting algorithm is embarrassingly parallel and is able to work at real-time speeds using a naive Python implementation. The quality of predicted locations of agents generated by the proposed algorithm is validated on a variety of examples and considerably higher than existing state of the art approaches over long time horizons.

Higher-order Spatial Accuracy in Diffeomorphic Image Registration

We discretize a cost functional for image registration problems by deriving Taylor expansions for the matching term. Minima of the discretized cost functionals can be computed with no spatial discretization error, and the optimal solutions are equivalent to minimal energy curves in the space of $k$-jets. We show that the solutions convergence to optimal solutions of the original cost functional as the number of particles increases with a convergence rate of $O(h^{d+k})$ where $h$ is a resolution parameter. The effect of this approach over traditional particle methods is illustrated on synthetic examples and real images.

Symmetry in Image Registration and Deformation Modeling

We survey the role of symmetry in diffeomorphic registration of landmarks, curves, surfaces, images and higher-order data. The infinite dimensional problem of finding correspondences between objects can for a range of concrete data types be reduced resulting in compact representations of shape and spatial structure. This reduction is possible because the available data is incomplete in encoding the full deformation model. Using reduction by symmetry, we describe the reduced models in a common theoretical framework that draws on links between the registration problem and geometric mechanics. Symmetry also arises in reduction to the Lie algebra using particle relabeling symmetry allowing the equations of motion to be written purely in terms of Eulerian velocity field. Reduction by symmetry has recently been applied for jet-matching and higher-order discrete approximations of the image matching problem. We outline these constructions and further cases where reduction by symmetry promises new approaches to registration of complex data types.