Application of Neuroevolution in Autonomous Cars

With the onset of Electric vehicles, and them becoming more and more popular, autonomous cars are the future in the travel/driving experience. The barrier to reaching level 5 autonomy is the difficulty in the collection of data that incorporates good driving habits and the lack thereof. The problem with current implementations of self-driving cars is the need for massively large datasets and the need to evaluate the driving in the dataset. We propose a system that requires no data for its training. An evolutionary model would have the capability to optimize itself towards the fitness function. We have implemented Neuroevolution, a form of genetic algorithm, to train/evolve self-driving cars in a simulated virtual environment with the help of Unreal Engine 4, which utilizes Nvidia's PhysX Physics Engine to portray real-world vehicle dynamics accurately. We were able to observe the serendipitous nature of evolution and have exploited it to reach our optimal solution. We also demonstrate the ease in generalizing attributes brought about by genetic algorithms and how they may be used as a boilerplate upon which other machine learning techniques may be used to improve the overall driving experience.

Deep Residual Network based food recognition for enhanced Augmented Reality application

Deep neural network based learning approaches is widely utilized for image classification or object detection based problems with remarkable outcomes. Realtime Object state estimation of objects can be used to track and estimate the features that the object of the current frame possesses without causing any significant delay and misclassification. A system that can detect the features of such objects in the present state from camera images can be used to enhance the application of Augmented Reality for improving user experience and delivering information in a much perceptual way. The focus behind this paper is to determine the most suitable model to create a low-latency assistance AR to aid users by providing them nutritional information about the food that they consume in order to promote healthier life choices. Hence the dataset has been collected and acquired in such a manner, and we conduct various tests in order to identify the most suitable DNN in terms of performance and complexity and establish a system that renders such information realtime to the user.