Towards Perception-based Collision Avoidance for UAVs when Guiding the Visually Impaired

Autonomous navigation by drones using onboard sensors combined with machine learning and computer vision algorithms is impacting a number of domains, including agriculture, logistics, and disaster management. In this paper, we examine the use of drones for assisting visually impaired people (VIPs) in navigating through outdoor urban environments. Specifically, we present a perception-based path planning system for local planning around the neighborhood of the VIP, integrated with a global planner based on GPS and maps for coarse planning. We represent the problem using a geometric formulation and propose a multi DNN based framework for obstacle avoidance of the UAV as well as the VIP. Our evaluations conducted on a drone human system in a university campus environment verifies the feasibility of our algorithms in three scenarios; when the VIP walks on a footpath, near parked vehicles, and in a crowded street.

DISPLACE Challenge: DIarization of SPeaker and LAnguage in Conversational Environments

The DISPLACE challenge entails a first-of-kind task to perform speaker and language diarization on the same data, as the data contains multi-speaker social conversations in multilingual code-mixed speech. The challenge attempts to benchmark and improve Speaker Diarization (SD) in multilingual settings and Language Diarization (LD) in multi-speaker settings. For this challenge, a natural multilingual, multi-speaker conversational dataset is distributed for development and evaluation purposes. Automatic systems are evaluated on single-channel far-field recordings containing natural code-mix, code-switch, overlap, reverberation, short turns, short pauses, and multiple dialects of the same language. A total of 60 teams from industry and academia have registered for this challenge.