Unsupervised Regionalization of Particle-resolved Aerosol Mixing State Indices on the Global Scale

The aerosol mixing state significantly affects the climate and health impacts of atmospheric aerosol particles. Simplified aerosol mixing state assumptions, common in Earth System models, can introduce errors in the prediction of these aerosol impacts. The aerosol mixing state index, a metric to quantify aerosol mixing state, is a convenient measure for quantifying these errors. Global estimates of aerosol mixing state indices have recently become available via supervised learning models, but require regionalization to ease spatiotemporal analysis. Here we developed a simple but effective unsupervised learning approach to regionalize predictions of global aerosol mixing state indices. We used the monthly average of aerosol mixing state indices global distribution as the input data. Grid cells were then clustered into regions by the k-means algorithm without explicit spatial information as input. This approach resulted in eleven regions over the globe with specific spatial aggregation patterns. Each region exhibited a unique distribution of mixing state indices and aerosol compositions, showing the effectiveness of the unsupervised regionalization approach. This study defines "aerosol mixing state zones" that could be useful for atmospheric science research.

BiTraP: Bi-directional Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Multi-modal Goal Estimation

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an essential task in robotic applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. State-of-the-art trajectory predictors use a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to encode observed trajectories and decode multi-modal future trajectories. This process can suffer from accumulated errors over long prediction horizons (>=2 seconds). This paper presents BiTraP, a goal-conditioned bi-directional multi-modal trajectory prediction method based on the CVAE. BiTraP estimates the goal (end-point) of trajectories and introduces a novel bi-directional decoder to improve longer-term trajectory prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that BiTraP generalizes to both first-person view (FPV) and bird's-eye view (BEV) scenarios and outperforms state-of-the-art results by ~10-50%. We also show that different choices of non-parametric versus parametric target models in the CVAE directly influence the predicted multi-modal trajectory distributions. These results provide guidance on trajectory predictor design for robotic applications such as collision avoidance and navigation systems.

Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning

The \textit{transition matrix}, denoting the transition relationship from clean labels to noisy labels, is essential to build \textit{statistically consistent} classifiers in label-noise learning. Existing methods for estimating the transition matrix rely heavily on estimating the noisy class posterior. However, the estimation error for \textit{noisy class posterior} could be large due to the randomness of label noise. The estimation error would lead the transition matrix to be poorly estimated. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to solve this problem by exploiting the divide-and-conquer paradigm. Specifically, we introduce an \textit{intermediate class} to avoid directly estimating the noisy class posterior. By this intermediate class, the original transition matrix can then be factorized into the product of two easy-to-estimate transition matrices. We term the proposed method the \textit{dual $T$-estimator}. Both theoretical analyses and empirical results illustrate the effectiveness of the dual $T$-estimator for estimating transition matrices, leading to better classification performances.

When, Where, and What? A New Dataset for Anomaly Detection in Driving Videos

Video anomaly detection (VAD) has been extensively studied. However, research on egocentric traffic videos with dynamic scenes lacks large-scale benchmark datasets as well as effective evaluation metrics. This paper proposes traffic anomaly detection with a \textit{when-where-what} pipeline to detect, localize, and recognize anomalous events from egocentric videos. We introduce a new dataset called Detection of Traffic Anomaly (DoTA) containing 4,677 videos with temporal, spatial, and categorical annotations. A new spatial-temporal area under curve (STAUC) evaluation metric is proposed and used with DoTA. State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked for two VAD-related tasks.Experimental results show STAUC is an effective VAD metric. To our knowledge, DoTA is the largest traffic anomaly dataset to-date and is the first supporting traffic anomaly studies across when-where-what perspectives. Our code and dataset can be found in: https://github.com/MoonBlvd/Detection-of-Traffic-Anomaly

Towards Mixture Proportion Estimation without Irreducibility

\textit{Mixture proportion estimation} (MPE) is a fundamental problem of practical significance, where we are given data from only a \textit{mixture} and one of its two \textit{components} to identify the proportion of each component. All existing MPE methods that are distribution-independent explicitly or implicitly rely on the \textit{irreducible} assumption---the unobserved component is not a mixture containing the observable component. If this is not satisfied, those methods will lead to a critical estimation bias. In this paper, we propose \textit{Regrouping-MPE} that works without irreducible assumption: it builds a new irreducible MPE problem and solves the new problem. It is worthwhile to change the problem: we prove that if the assumption holds, our method will not affect anything; if the assumption does not hold, the bias from problem changing is less than the bias from violation of the irreducible assumption in the original problem. Experiments show that our method outperforms all state-of-the-art MPE methods on various real-world datasets.

Game-Theoretic Modeling of Multi-Vehicle Interactions at Uncontrolled Intersections

Motivated by the need to develop simulation tools for verification and validation of autonomous driving systems operating in traffic consisting of both autonomous and human-driven vehicles, we propose a framework for modeling vehicle interactions at uncontrolled intersections. The proposed interaction modeling approach is based on game theory with multiple concurrent leader-follower pairs, and accounts for common traffic rules. We parameterize the intersection layouts and geometries to model uncontrolled intersections with various configurations, and apply the proposed approach to model the interactive behavior of vehicles at these intersections. Based on simulation results in various traffic scenarios, we show that the model exhibits reasonable behavior expected in traffic, including the capability of reproducing scenarios extracted from real-world traffic data and reasonable performance in resolving traffic conflicts. The model is further validated based on the level-of-service traffic quality rating system and demonstrates manageable computational complexity compared to traditional multi-player game-theoretic models.

Realtime Rooftop Landing Site Identification and Selection in Urban City Simulation

Safe autonomous landing in urban cities is a necessity for the growing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) industry. In urgent situations, building rooftops, particularly flat rooftops, can provide local safe landing zones for small UAS. This paper investigates the real-time identification and selection of safe landing zones on rooftops based on LiDAR and camera sensor feedback. A visual high fidelity simulated city is constructed in the Unreal game engine, with particular attention paid to accurately generating rooftops and the common obstructions found thereon, e.g., ac units, water towers, air vents. AirSim, a robotic simulator plugin for Unreal, offers drone simulation and control and is capable of outputting video and LiDAR sensor data streams from the simulated Unreal world. A neural network is trained on randomized simulated cities to provide a pixel classification model. A novel algorithm is presented which finds the optimum obstacle-free landing position on nearby rooftops by fusing LiDAR and vision data.

Egocentric Vision-based Future Vehicle Localization for Intelligent Driving Assistance Systems

Predicting the future location of vehicles is essential for safety-critical applications such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. This paper introduces a novel approach to simultaneously predict both the location and scale of target vehicles in the first-person (egocentric) view of an ego-vehicle. We present a multi-stream recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder-decoder model that separately captures both object location and scale and pixel-level observations for future vehicle localization. We show that incorporating dense optical flow improves prediction results significantly since it captures information about motion as well as appearance change. We also find that explicitly modeling future motion of the ego-vehicle improves the prediction accuracy, which could be especially beneficial in intelligent and automated vehicles that have motion planning capability. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we present a new dataset of first-person videos collected from a variety of scenarios at road intersections, which are particularly challenging moments for prediction because vehicle trajectories are diverse and dynamic.

Unsupervised Traffic Accident Detection in First-Person Videos

Recognizing abnormal events such as traffic violations and accidents in natural driving scenes is essential for successful autonomous and advanced driver assistance systems. However, most work on video anomaly detection suffers from one of two crucial drawbacks. First, it assumes cameras are fixed and videos have a static background, which is reasonable for surveillance applications but not for vehicle-mounted cameras. Second, it poses the problem as one-class classification, which relies on arduous human annotation and only recognizes categories of anomalies that have been explicitly trained. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for traffic accident detection in first-person videos. Our major novelty is to detect anomalies by predicting the future locations of traffic participants and then monitoring the prediction accuracy and consistency metrics with three different strategies. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new dataset of diverse traffic accidents, AnAn Accident Detection (A3D), as well as another publicly-available dataset. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art.