Coverage path planning in a generic known environment is shown to be NP-hard. When the environment is unknown, it becomes more challenging as the robot is required to rely on its online map information built during coverage for planning its path. A significant research effort focuses on designing heuristic or approximate algorithms that achieve reasonable performance. Such algorithms have sub-optimal performance in terms of covering the area or the cost of coverage, e.g., coverage time or energy consumption. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of the coverage problem and formulate it as an optimal stopping time problem, where the trade-off between coverage performance and its cost is explicitly accounted for. Next, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) techniques can be leveraged to solve the problem computationally. To this end, we provide some technical and practical considerations to facilitate the application of the RL algorithms and improve the efficiency of the solutions. Finally, through experiments in grid world environments and Gazebo simulator, we show that reinforcement learning-based algorithms efficiently cover realistic unknown indoor environments, and outperform the current state of the art.
Zero-shot object detection (ZSD), the task that extends conventional detection models to detecting objects from unseen categories, has emerged as a new challenge in computer vision. Most existing approaches tackle the ZSD task with a strict mapping-transfer strategy, which may lead to suboptimal ZSD results: 1) the learning process of those models ignores the available unseen class information, and thus can be easily biased towards the seen categories; 2) the original visual feature space is not well-structured and lack of discriminative information. To address these issues, we develop a novel Semantics-Guided Contrastive Network for ZSD, named ContrastZSD, a detection framework that first brings contrastive learning mechanism into the realm of zero-shot detection. Particularly, ContrastZSD incorporates two semantics-guided contrastive learning subnets that contrast between region-category and region-region pairs respectively. The pairwise contrastive tasks take advantage of additional supervision signals derived from both ground truth label and pre-defined class similarity distribution. Under the guidance of those explicit semantic supervision, the model can learn more knowledge about unseen categories to avoid the bias problem to seen concepts, while optimizing the data structure of visual features to be more discriminative for better visual-semantic alignment. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular benchmarks for ZSD, i.e., PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. Results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on both ZSD and generalized ZSD tasks.
Arbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high complexity and variety of scene texts. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive boundary proposal network for arbitrary shape text detection, which can learn to directly produce accurate boundary for arbitrary shape text without any post-processing. Our method mainly consists of a boundary proposal model and an innovative adaptive boundary deformation model. The boundary proposal model constructed by multi-layer dilated convolutions is adopted to produce prior information (including classification map, distance field, and direction field) and coarse boundary proposals. The adaptive boundary deformation model is an encoder-decoder network, in which the encoder mainly consists of a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). It aims to perform boundary deformation in an iterative way for obtaining text instance shape guided by prior information from the boundary proposal model. In this way, our method can directly and efficiently generate accurate text boundaries without complex post-processing. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
Visual place recognition (VPR) is critical in not only localization and mapping for autonomous driving vehicles, but also assistive navigation for the visually impaired population. To enable a long-term VPR system on a large scale, several challenges need to be addressed. First, different applications could require different image view directions, such as front views for self-driving cars while side views for the low vision people. Second, VPR in metropolitan scenes can often cause privacy concerns due to the imaging of pedestrian and vehicle identity information, calling for the need for data anonymization before VPR queries and database construction. Both factors could lead to VPR performance variations that are not well understood yet. To study their influences, we present the NYU-VPR dataset that contains more than 200,000 images over a 2km by 2km area near the New York University campus, taken within the whole year of 2016. We present benchmark results on several popular VPR algorithms showing that side views are significantly more challenging for current VPR methods while the influence of data anonymization is almost negligible, together with our hypothetical explanations and in-depth analysis.
In this paper, we propose a cross-modal variational auto-encoder (CMVAE) for content-based micro-video background music recommendation. CMVAE is a hierarchical Bayesian generative model that matches relevant background music to a micro-video by projecting these two multimodal inputs into a shared low-dimensional latent space, where the alignment of two corresponding embeddings of a matched video-music pair is achieved by cross-generation. Moreover, the multimodal information is fused by the product-of-experts (PoE) principle, where the semantic information in visual and textual modalities of the micro-video are weighted according to their variance estimations such that the modality with a lower noise level is given more weights. Therefore, the micro-video latent variables contain less irrelevant information that results in a more robust model generalization. Furthermore, we establish a large-scale content-based micro-video background music recommendation dataset, TT-150k, composed of approximately 3,000 different background music clips associated to 150,000 micro-videos from different users. Extensive experiments on the established TT-150k dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. A qualitative assessment of CMVAE by visualizing some recommendation results is also included.
An iris presentation attack detection (IPAD) is essential for securing personal identity is widely used iris recognition systems. However, the existing IPAD algorithms do not generalize well to unseen and cross-domain scenarios because of capture in unconstrained environments and high visual correlation amongst bonafide and attack samples. These similarities in intricate textural and morphological patterns of iris ocular images contribute further to performance degradation. To alleviate these shortcomings, this paper proposes DFCANet: Dense Feature Calibration and Attention Guided Network which calibrates the locally spread iris patterns with the globally located ones. Uplifting advantages from feature calibration convolution and residual learning, DFCANet generates domain-specific iris feature representations. Since some channels in the calibrated feature maps contain more prominent information, we capitalize discriminative feature learning across the channels through the channel attention mechanism. In order to intensify the challenge for our proposed model, we make DFCANet operate over nonsegmented and non-normalized ocular iris images. Extensive experimentation conducted over challenging cross-domain and intra-domain scenarios highlights consistent outperforming results. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, DFCANet achieves significant gains in performance for the benchmark IIITD CLI, IIIT CSD and NDCLD13 databases respectively. Further, a novel incremental learning-based methodology has been introduced so as to overcome disentangled iris-data characteristics and data scarcity. This paper also pursues the challenging scenario that considers soft-lens under the attack category with evaluation performed under various cross-domain protocols. The code will be made publicly available.
In this paper we exploit Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) to increase the amount of training data to improve the performance of Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC). This problem has not been investigated in the past in spite of prohibitive annotation costs that FGVC requires. Our approach leverages unlabeled data with an adversarial optimization strategy in which the internal features representation is obtained with a second-order pooling model. This combination allows to back-propagate the information of the parts, represented by second-order pooling, onto unlabeled data in an adversarial training setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined use by conducting experiments on six state-of-the-art fine-grained datasets, which include Aircrafts, Stanford Cars, CUB-200-2011, Oxford Flowers, Stanford Dogs, and the recent Semi-Supervised iNaturalist-Aves. Experimental results clearly show that our proposed method has better performance than the only previous approach that examined this problem; it also obtained higher classification accuracy with respect to the supervised learning methods with which we compared.
It is very challenging for various visual tasks such as image fusion, pedestrian detection and image-to-image translation in low light conditions due to the loss of effective target areas. In this case, infrared and visible images can be used together to provide both rich detail information and effective target areas. In this paper, we present LLVIP, a visible-infrared paired dataset for low-light vision. This dataset contains 33672 images, or 16836 pairs, most of which were taken at very dark scenes, and all of the images are strictly aligned in time and space. Pedestrians in the dataset are labeled. We compare the dataset with other visible-infrared datasets and evaluate the performance of some popular visual algorithms including image fusion, pedestrian detection and image-to-image translation on the dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the complementary effect of fusion on image information, and find the deficiency of existing algorithms of the three visual tasks in very low-light conditions. We believe the LLVIP dataset will contribute to the community of computer vision by promoting image fusion, pedestrian detection and image-to-image translation in very low-light applications. The dataset is being released in https://bupt-ai-cz.github.io/LLVIP.
Attribute-driven privacy aims to conceal a single user's attribute, contrary to anonymisation that tries to hide the full identity of the user in some data. When the attribute to protect from malicious inferences is binary, perfect privacy requires the log-likelihood-ratio to be zero resulting in no strength-of-evidence. This work presents an approach based on normalizing flow that maps a feature vector into a latent space where the strength-of-evidence, related to the binary attribute, and an independent residual are disentangled. It can be seen as a non-linear discriminant analysis where the mapping is invertible allowing generation by mapping the latent variable back to the original space. This framework allows to manipulate the log-likelihood-ratio of the data and thus to set it to zero for privacy. We show the applicability of the approach on an attribute-driven privacy task where the sex information is removed from speaker embeddings. Results on VoxCeleb2 dataset show the efficiency of the method that outperforms in terms of privacy and utility our previous experiments based on adversarial disentanglement.
This paper considers the problem of multi-server Private Linear Computation, under the joint and individual privacy guarantees. In this problem, identical copies of a dataset comprised of $K$ messages are stored on $N$ non-colluding servers, and a user wishes to obtain one linear combination of a $D$-subset of messages belonging to the dataset. The goal is to design a scheme for performing the computation such that the total amount of information downloaded from the servers is minimized, while the privacy of the $D$ messages required for the computation is protected. When joint privacy is required, the identities of all of these $D$ messages must be kept private jointly, and when individual privacy is required, the identity of every one of these $D$ messages must be kept private individually. In this work, we characterize the capacity, which is defined as the maximum achievable download rate, under both joint and individual privacy requirements. In particular, we show that the capacity is given respectively by ${(1+1/N+\dots+1/N^{K-D})^{-1}}$ or ${(1+1/N+\dots+1/N^{\lceil K/D\rceil-1})^{-1}}$ when joint or individual privacy is required. Our converse proofs are based on reduction from two variants of the multi-server Private Information Retrieval problem in the presence of side information. Our achievability schemes build up on our recently proposed schemes for single-server Private Linear Transformation and the multi-server private computation scheme proposed by Sun and Jafar. Using similar proof techniques, we also establish upper and lower bounds on the capacity for the cases in which the user wants to compute $L$ (potentially more than one) linear combinations. Specifically, we show that the capacity is upper and lower bounded respectively by ${(1+1/N+\dots+1/N^{(K-D)/L})^{-1}}$ and ${(1+1/N+\dots+1/N^{K-D+L-1})^{-1}}$, when joint privacy is required.