Future Near-Collision Prediction from Monocular Video: Feasibility, Dataset, and Challenges

We explore the possibility of using a single monocular camera to forecast the time to collision between a suitcase-shaped robot being pushed by its user and other nearby pedestrians. We develop a purely image-based deep learning approach that directly estimates the time to collision without the need of relying on explicit geometric depth estimates or velocity information to predict future collisions. While previous work has focused on detecting immediate collision in the context of navigating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, the detection was limited to a binary variable (i.e., collision or no collision). We propose a more fine-grained approach to collision forecasting by predicting the exact time to collision in terms of milliseconds, which is more helpful for collision avoidance in the context of dynamic path planning. To evaluate our method, we have collected a novel large-scale dataset of over 13,000 indoor video segments each showing a trajectory of at least one person ending in a close proximity (a near collision) with the camera mounted on a mobile suitcase-shaped platform. Using this dataset, we do extensive experimentation on different temporal windows as input using an exhaustive list of state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our results show that our proposed multi-stream CNN is the best model for predicting time to near-collision. The average prediction error of our time to near collision is 0.75 seconds across our test environments.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement learning has steadily improved and outperform human in lots of traditional games since the resurgence of deep neural network. However, these success is not easy to be copied to autonomous driving because the state spaces in real world are extreme complex and action spaces are continuous and fine control is required. Moreover, the autonomous driving vehicles must also keep functional safety under the complex environments. To deal with these challenges, we first adopt the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, which has the capacity to handle complex state and action spaces in continuous domain. We then choose The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) as our environment to avoid physical damage. Meanwhile, we select a set of appropriate sensor information from TORCS and design our own rewarder. In order to fit DDPG algorithm to TORCS, we design our network architecture for both actor and critic inside DDPG paradigm. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, We evaluate on different modes in TORCS and show both quantitative and qualitative results.

CyLKs: Unsupervised Cycle Lucas-Kanade Network for Landmark Tracking

Across a majority of modern learning-based tracking systems, expensive annotations are needed to achieve state-of-the-art performance. In contrast, the Lucas-Kanade (LK) algorithm works well without any annotation. However, LK has a strong assumption of photometric (brightness) consistency on image intensity and is easy to drift because of large motion, occlusion, and aperture problem. To relax the assumption and alleviate the drift problem, we propose CyLKs, a data-driven way of training Lucas-Kanade in an unsupervised manner. CyLKs learns a feature transformation through CNNs, transforming the input images to a feature space which is especially favorable to LK tracking. During training, we perform differentiable Lucas-Kanade forward and backward on the convolutional feature maps, and then minimize the re-projection error. During testing, we perform the LK tracking on the learned features. We apply our model to the task of landmark tracking and perform experiments on datasets of THUMOS, 300VW, and Mugsy.

Image Labeling with Markov Random Fields and Conditional Random Fields

Most existing methods for object segmentation in computer vision are formulated as a labeling task. This, in general, could be transferred to a pixel-wise label assignment task, which is quite similar to the structure of hidden Markov random field. In terms of Markov random field, each pixel can be regarded as a state and has a transition probability to its neighbor pixel, the label behind each pixel is a latent variable and has an emission probability from its corresponding state. In this paper, we reviewed several modern image labeling methods based on Markov random field and conditional random Field. And we compare the result of these methods with some classical image labeling methods. The experiment demonstrates that the introduction of Markov random field and conditional random field make a big difference in the segmentation result.

GroundNet: Segmentation-Aware Monocular Ground Plane Estimation with Geometric Consistency

We focus on the problem of estimating the orientation of the ground plane with respect to a mobile monocular camera platform (e.g., ground robot, wearable camera, assistive robotic platform). To address this problem, we formulate the ground plane estimation problem as an inter-mingled multi-task prediction problem by jointly optimizing for point-wise surface normal direction, 2D ground segmentation, and depth estimates. Our proposed model -- GroundNet -- estimates the ground normal in two streams separately and then a consistency loss is applied on top of the two streams to enforce geometric consistency. A semantic segmentation stream is used to isolate the ground regions and are used to selectively back-propagate parameter updates only through the ground regions in the image. Our experiments on KITTI and ApolloScape datasets verify that the GroundNet is able to predict consistent depth and normal within the ground region. It also achieves top performance on ground plane normal estimation and horizon line detection.

Supervision-by-Registration: An Unsupervised Approach to Improve the Precision of Facial Landmark Detectors

In this paper, we present supervision-by-registration, an unsupervised approach to improve the precision of facial landmark detectors on both images and video. Our key observation is that the detections of the same landmark in adjacent frames should be coherent with registration, i.e., optical flow. Interestingly, the coherency of optical flow is a source of supervision that does not require manual labeling, and can be leveraged during detector training. For example, we can enforce in the training loss function that a detected landmark at frame$_{t-1}$ followed by optical flow tracking from frame$_{t-1}$ to frame$_t$ should coincide with the location of the detection at frame$_t$. Essentially, supervision-by-registration augments the training loss function with a registration loss, thus training the detector to have output that is not only close to the annotations in labeled images, but also consistent with registration on large amounts of unlabeled videos. End-to-end training with the registration loss is made possible by a differentiable Lucas-Kanade operation, which computes optical flow registration in the forward pass, and back-propagates gradients that encourage temporal coherency in the detector. The output of our method is a more precise image-based facial landmark detector, which can be applied to single images or video. With supervision-by-registration, we demonstrate (1) improvements in facial landmark detection on both images (300W, ALFW) and video (300VW, Youtube-Celebrities), and (2) significant reduction of jittering in video detections.

Rotational Rectification Network: Enabling Pedestrian Detection for Mobile Vision

Across a majority of pedestrian detection datasets, it is typically assumed that pedestrians will be standing upright with respect to the image coordinate system. This assumption, however, is not always valid for many vision-equipped mobile platforms such as mobile phones, UAVs or construction vehicles on rugged terrain. In these situations, the motion of the camera can cause images of pedestrians to be captured at extreme angles. This can lead to very poor pedestrian detection performance when using standard pedestrian detectors. To address this issue, we propose a Rotational Rectification Network (R2N) that can be inserted into any CNN-based pedestrian (or object) detector to adapt it to significant changes in camera rotation. The rotational rectification network uses a 2D rotation estimation module that passes rotational information to a spatial transformer network to undistort image features. To enable robust rotation estimation, we propose a Global Polar Pooling (GP-Pooling) operator to capture rotational shifts in convolutional features. Through our experiments, we show how our rotational rectification network can be used to improve the performance of the state-of-the-art pedestrian detector under heavy image rotation by up to 45%

Visual Compiler: Synthesizing a Scene-Specific Pedestrian Detector and Pose Estimator

We introduce the concept of a Visual Compiler that generates a scene specific pedestrian detector and pose estimator without any pedestrian observations. Given a single image and auxiliary scene information in the form of camera parameters and geometric layout of the scene, the Visual Compiler first infers geometrically and photometrically accurate images of humans in that scene through the use of computer graphics rendering. Using these renders we learn a scene-and-region specific spatially-varying fully convolutional neural network, for simultaneous detection, pose estimation and segmentation of pedestrians. We demonstrate that when real human annotated data is scarce or non-existent, our data generation strategy can provide an excellent solution for bootstrapping human detection and pose estimation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms off-the-shelf state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors and pose estimators that are trained on real data.