Designing Robots to Help Women

Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly underrepresented in robotics. Here we used a speculative prototyping approach to explore this expansive design space: First, we identified some potential challenges of interest, including crimes and illnesses that disproportionately affect women, as well as potential opportunities for designers, which were visualized in five sketches. Then, one of the sketched scenarios was further explored by developing a prototype, of a robotic helper drone equipped with computer vision to detect hidden cameras that could be used to spy on women. While object detection introduced some errors, hidden cameras were identified with a reasonable accuracy of 80\% (Intersection over Union (IoU) score: 0.40). Our aim is that the identified challenges and opportunities could help spark discussion and inspire designers, toward realizing a safer, more inclusive future through responsible use of technology.

Road Obstacle Detection based on Unknown Objectness Scores

The detection of unknown traffic obstacles is vital to ensure safe autonomous driving. The standard object-detection methods cannot identify unknown objects that are not included under predefined categories. This is because object-detection methods are trained to assign a background label to pixels corresponding to the presence of unknown objects. To address this problem, the pixel-wise anomaly-detection approach has attracted increased research attention. Anomaly-detection techniques, such as uncertainty estimation and perceptual difference from reconstructed images, make it possible to identify pixels of unknown objects as out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, when applied to images with many unknowns and complex components, such as driving scenes, these methods often exhibit unstable performance. The purpose of this study is to achieve stable performance for detecting unknown objects by incorporating the object-detection fashions into the pixel-wise anomaly detection methods. To achieve this goal, we adopt a semantic-segmentation network with a sigmoid head that simultaneously provides pixel-wise anomaly scores and objectness scores. Our experimental results show that the objectness scores play an important role in improving the detection performance. Based on these results, we propose a novel anomaly score by integrating these two scores, which we term as unknown objectness score. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods when applied to the publicly available datasets.

Object-level Copy-Move Forgery Image Detection based on Inconsistency Mining

In copy-move tampering operations, perpetrators often employ techniques, such as blurring, to conceal tampering traces, posing significant challenges to the detection of object-level targets with intact structures. Focus on these challenges, this paper proposes an Object-level Copy-Move Forgery Image Detection based on Inconsistency Mining (IMNet). To obtain complete object-level targets, we customize prototypes for both the source and tampered regions and dynamically update them. Additionally, we extract inconsistent regions between coarse similar regions obtained through self-correlation calculations and regions composed of prototypes. The detected inconsistent regions are used as supplements to coarse similar regions to refine pixel-level detection. We operate experiments on three public datasets which validate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed IMNet.

Boosting Semi-Supervised Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images With Active Teaching

The lack of object-level annotations poses a significant challenge for object detection in remote sensing images (RSIs). To address this issue, active learning (AL) and semi-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have been proposed to enhance the quality and quantity of annotations. AL focuses on selecting the most informative samples for annotation, while SSL leverages the knowledge from unlabeled samples. In this letter, we propose a novel AL method to boost semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) for remote sensing images with a teacher student network, called SSOD-AT. The proposed method incorporates an RoI comparison module (RoICM) to generate high-confidence pseudo-labels for regions of interest (RoIs). Meanwhile, the RoICM is utilized to identify the top-K uncertain images. To reduce redundancy in the top-K uncertain images for human labeling, a diversity criterion is introduced based on object-level prototypes of different categories using both labeled and pseudo-labeled images. Extensive experiments on DOTA and DIOR, two popular datasets, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for object detection in RSIs. Compared with the best performance in the SOTA methods, the proposed method achieves 1 percent improvement in most cases in the whole AL.

Unsupervised learning based object detection using Contrastive Learning

Training image-based object detectors presents formidable challenges, as it entails not only the complexities of object detection but also the added intricacies of precisely localizing objects within potentially diverse and noisy environments. However, the collection of imagery itself can often be straightforward; for instance, cameras mounted in vehicles can effortlessly capture vast amounts of data in various real-world scenarios. In light of this, we introduce a groundbreaking method for training single-stage object detectors through unsupervised/self-supervised learning. Our state-of-the-art approach has the potential to revolutionize the labeling process, substantially reducing the time and cost associated with manual annotation. Furthermore, it paves the way for previously unattainable research opportunities, particularly for large, diverse, and challenging datasets lacking extensive labels. In contrast to prevalent unsupervised learning methods that primarily target classification tasks, our approach takes on the unique challenge of object detection. We pioneer the concept of intra-image contrastive learning alongside inter-image counterparts, enabling the acquisition of crucial location information essential for object detection. The method adeptly learns and represents this location information, yielding informative heatmaps. Our results showcase an outstanding accuracy of \textbf{89.2\%}, marking a significant breakthrough of approximately \textbf{15x} over random initialization in the realm of unsupervised object detection within the field of computer vision.

Accurate Cutting-point Estimation for Robotic Lychee Harvesting through Geometry-aware Learning

Accurately identifying lychee-picking points in unstructured orchard environments and obtaining their coordinate locations is critical to the success of lychee-picking robots. However, traditional two-dimensional (2D) image-based object detection methods often struggle due to the complex geometric structures of branches, leaves and fruits, leading to incorrect determination of lychee picking points. In this study, we propose a Fcaf3d-lychee network model specifically designed for the accurate localisation of lychee picking points. Point cloud data of lychee picking points in natural environments are acquired using Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK time-of-flight (TOF) camera through multi-view stitching. We augment the Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection (Fcaf3d) model with a squeeze-and-excitation(SE) module, which exploits human visual attention mechanisms for improved feature extraction of lychee picking points. The trained network model is evaluated on a test set of lychee-picking locations and achieves an impressive F1 score of 88.57%, significantly outperforming existing models. Subsequent three-dimensional (3D) position detection of picking points in real lychee orchard environments yields high accuracy, even under varying degrees of occlusion. Localisation errors of lychee picking points are within 1.5 cm in all directions, demonstrating the robustness and generality of the model.

Class Imbalance in Object Detection: An Experimental Diagnosis and Study of Mitigation Strategies

Object detection, a pivotal task in computer vision, is frequently hindered by dataset imbalances, particularly the under-explored issue of foreground-foreground class imbalance. This lack of attention to foreground-foreground class imbalance becomes even more pronounced in the context of single-stage detectors. This study introduces a benchmarking framework utilizing the YOLOv5 single-stage detector to address the problem of foreground-foreground class imbalance. We crafted a novel 10-class long-tailed dataset from the COCO dataset, termed COCO-ZIPF, tailored to reflect common real-world detection scenarios with a limited number of object classes. Against this backdrop, we scrutinized three established techniques: sampling, loss weighing, and data augmentation. Our comparative analysis reveals that sampling and loss reweighing methods, while shown to be beneficial in two-stage detector settings, do not translate as effectively in improving YOLOv5's performance on the COCO-ZIPF dataset. On the other hand, data augmentation methods, specifically mosaic and mixup, significantly enhance the model's mean Average Precision (mAP), by introducing more variability and complexity into the training data. (Code available: https://github.com/craston/object_detection_cib)

Sparse Generation: Making Pseudo Labels Sparse for weakly supervision with points

In recent years, research on point weakly supervised object detection (PWSOD) methods in the field of computer vision has attracted people's attention. However, existing pseudo labels generation methods perform poorly in a small amount of supervised annotation data and dense object detection tasks. We consider the generation of weakly supervised pseudo labels as the result of model's sparse output, and propose a method called Sparse Generation to make pseudo labels sparse. It constructs dense tensors through the relationship between data and detector model, optimizes three of its parameters, and obtains a sparse tensor via coordinated calculation, thereby indirectly obtaining higher quality pseudo labels, and solving the model's density problem in the situation of only a small amount of supervised annotation data can be used. On two broadly used open-source datasets (RSOD, SIMD) and a self-built dataset (Bullet-Hole), the experimental results showed that the proposed method has a significant advantage in terms of overall performance metrics, comparing to that state-of-the-art method.

Eliminating Cross-modal Conflicts in BEV Space for LiDAR-Camera 3D Object Detection

Recent 3D object detectors typically utilize multi-sensor data and unify multi-modal features in the shared bird's-eye view (BEV) representation space. However, our empirical findings indicate that previous methods have limitations in generating fusion BEV features free from cross-modal conflicts. These conflicts encompass extrinsic conflicts caused by BEV feature construction and inherent conflicts stemming from heterogeneous sensor signals. Therefore, we propose a novel Eliminating Conflicts Fusion (ECFusion) method to explicitly eliminate the extrinsic/inherent conflicts in BEV space and produce improved multi-modal BEV features. Specifically, we devise a Semantic-guided Flow-based Alignment (SFA) module to resolve extrinsic conflicts via unifying spatial distribution in BEV space before fusion. Moreover, we design a Dissolved Query Recovering (DQR) mechanism to remedy inherent conflicts by preserving objectness clues that are lost in the fusion BEV feature. In general, our method maximizes the effective information utilization of each modality and leverages inter-modal complementarity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the highly competitive nuScenes 3D object detection dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/fjhzhixi/ECFusion.

V2X-DGW: Domain Generalization for Multi-agent Perception under Adverse Weather Conditions

Current LiDAR-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) multi-agent perception systems have shown the significant success on 3D object detection. While these models perform well in the trained clean weather, they struggle in unseen adverse weather conditions with the real-world domain gap. In this paper, we propose a domain generalization approach, named V2X-DGW, for LiDAR-based 3D object detection on multi-agent perception system under adverse weather conditions. Not only in the clean weather does our research aim to ensure favorable multi-agent performance, but also in the unseen adverse weather conditions by learning only on the clean weather data. To advance research in this area, we have simulated the impact of three prevalent adverse weather conditions on two widely-used multi-agent datasets, resulting in the creation of two novel benchmark datasets: OPV2V-w and V2XSet-w. To this end, we first introduce the Adaptive Weather Augmentation (AWA) to mimic the unseen adverse weather conditions, and then propose two alignments for generalizable representation learning: Trust-region Weather-invariant Alignment (TWA) and Agent-aware Contrastive Alignment (ACA). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our V2X-DGW achieved improvements in the unseen adverse weather conditions.