Falsification of a Vision-based Automatic Landing System

At smaller airports without an instrument approach or advanced equipment, automatic landing of aircraft is a safety-critical task that requires the use of sensors present on the aircraft. In this paper, we study falsification of an automatic landing system for fixed-wing aircraft using a camera as its main sensor. We first present an architecture for vision-based automatic landing, including a vision-based runway distance and orientation estimator and an associated PID controller. We then outline landing specifications that we validate with actual flight data. Using these specifications, we propose the use of the falsification tool Breach to find counterexamples to the specifications in the automatic landing system. Our experiments are implemented using a Beechcraft Baron 58 in the X-Plane flight simulator communicating with MATLAB Simulink.

Siamese Learning-based Monarch Butterfly Localization

A new GPS-less, daily localization method is proposed with deep learning sensor fusion that uses daylight intensity and temperature sensor data for Monarch butterfly tracking. Prior methods suffer from the location-independent day length during the equinox, resulting in high localization errors around that date. This work proposes a new Siamese learning-based localization model that improves the accuracy and reduces the bias of daily Monarch butterfly localization using light and temperature measurements. To train and test the proposed algorithm, we use $5658$ daily measurement records collected through a data measurement campaign involving 306 volunteers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico from 2018 to 2020. This model achieves a mean absolute error of $1.416^\circ$ in latitude and $0.393^\circ$ in longitude coordinates outperforming the prior method.

Efficient Computation Sharing for Multi-Task Visual Scene Understanding

Solving multiple visual tasks using individual models can be resource-intensive, while multi-task learning can conserve resources by sharing knowledge across different tasks. Despite the benefits of multi-task learning, such techniques can struggle with balancing the loss for each task, leading to potential performance degradation. We present a novel computation- and parameter-sharing framework that balances efficiency and accuracy to perform multiple visual tasks utilizing individually-trained single-task transformers. Our method is motivated by transfer learning schemes to reduce computational and parameter storage costs while maintaining the desired performance. Our approach involves splitting the tasks into a base task and the other sub-tasks, and sharing a significant portion of activations and parameters/weights between the base and sub-tasks to decrease inter-task redundancies and enhance knowledge sharing. The evaluation conducted on NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-context datasets shows that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art transformer-based multi-task learning techniques with higher accuracy and reduced computational resources. Moreover, our method is extended to video stream inputs, further reducing computational costs by efficiently sharing information across the temporal domain as well as the task domain. Our codes and models will be publicly available.