Intelligent vehicles of the future must be capable of understanding and navigating safely through their surroundings. Camera-based vehicle systems can use keypoints as well as objects as low- and high-level landmarks for GNSS-independent SLAM and visual odometry. To this end we propose YOLOPoint, a convolutional neural network model that simultaneously detects keypoints and objects in an image by combining YOLOv5 and SuperPoint to create a single forward-pass network that is both real-time capable and accurate. By using a shared backbone and a light-weight network structure, YOLOPoint is able to perform competitively on both the HPatches and KITTI benchmarks.
Visual relocalization is crucial for autonomous visual localization and navigation of mobile robotics. Due to the improvement of CNN-based object detection algorithm, the robustness of visual relocalization is greatly enhanced especially in viewpoints where classical methods fail. However, ellipsoids (quadrics) generated by axis-aligned object detection may limit the accuracy of the object-level representation and degenerate the performance of visual relocalization system. In this paper, we propose a novel method of automatic object-level voxel modeling for accurate ellipsoidal representations of objects. As for visual relocalization, we design a better pose optimization strategy for camera pose recovery, to fully utilize the projection characteristics of 2D fitted ellipses and the 3D accurate ellipsoids. All of these modules are entirely intergrated into visual SLAM system. Experimental results show that our semantic object-level mapping and object-based visual relocalization methods significantly enhance the performance of visual relocalization in terms of robustness to new viewpoints.
Low-light conditions and occluded scenarios impede object detection in real-world Internet of Things (IoT) applications like autonomous vehicles and security systems. While advanced machine learning models strive for accuracy, their computational demands clash with the limitations of resource-constrained devices, hampering real-time performance. In our current research, we tackle this challenge, by introducing "YOLO Phantom", one of the smallest YOLO models ever conceived. YOLO Phantom utilizes the novel Phantom Convolution block, achieving comparable accuracy to the latest YOLOv8n model while simultaneously reducing both parameters and model size by 43%, resulting in a significant 19% reduction in Giga Floating Point Operations (GFLOPs). YOLO Phantom leverages transfer learning on our multimodal RGB-infrared dataset to address low-light and occlusion issues, equipping it with robust vision under adverse conditions. Its real-world efficacy is demonstrated on an IoT platform with advanced low-light and RGB cameras, seamlessly connecting to an AWS-based notification endpoint for efficient real-time object detection. Benchmarks reveal a substantial boost of 17% and 14% in frames per second (FPS) for thermal and RGB detection, respectively, compared to the baseline YOLOv8n model. For community contribution, both the code and the multimodal dataset are available on GitHub.
An object handover between a robot and a human is a coordinated action which is prone to failure for reasons such as miscommunication, incorrect actions and unexpected object properties. Existing works on handover failure detection and prevention focus on preventing failures due to object slip or external disturbances. However, there is a lack of datasets and evaluation methods that consider unpreventable failures caused by the human participant. To address this deficit, we present the multimodal Handover Failure Detection dataset, which consists of failures induced by the human participant, such as ignoring the robot or not releasing the object. We also present two baseline methods for handover failure detection: (i) a video classification method using 3D CNNs and (ii) a temporal action segmentation approach which jointly classifies the human action, robot action and overall outcome of the action. The results show that video is an important modality, but using force-torque data and gripper position help improve failure detection and action segmentation accuracy.
The enhancement of 3D object detection is pivotal for precise environmental perception and improved task execution capabilities in autonomous driving. LiDAR point clouds, offering accurate depth information, serve as a crucial information for this purpose. Our study focuses on key challenges in 3D target detection. To tackle the challenge of expanding the receptive field of a 3D convolutional kernel, we introduce the Dynamic Feature Fusion Module (DFFM). This module achieves adaptive expansion of the 3D convolutional kernel's receptive field, balancing the expansion with acceptable computational loads. This innovation reduces operations, expands the receptive field, and allows the model to dynamically adjust to different object requirements. Simultaneously, we identify redundant information in 3D features. Employing the Feature Selection Module (FSM) quantitatively evaluates and eliminates non-important features, achieving the separation of output box fitting and feature extraction. This innovation enables the detector to focus on critical features, resulting in model compression, reduced computational burden, and minimized candidate frame interference. Extensive experiments confirm that both DFFM and FSM not only enhance current benchmarks, particularly in small target detection, but also accelerate network performance. Importantly, these modules exhibit effective complementarity.
This work presents a neural network model capable of recognizing small and tiny objects in thermal images collected by unmanned aerial vehicles. Our model consists of three parts, the backbone, the neck, and the prediction head. The backbone is developed based on the structure of YOLOv5 combined with the use of a transformer encoder at the end. The neck includes a BI-FPN block combined with the use of a sliding window and a transformer to increase the information fed into the prediction head. The prediction head carries out the detection by evaluating feature maps with the Sigmoid function. The use of transformers with attention and sliding windows increases recognition accuracy while keeping the model at a reasonable number of parameters and computation requirements for embedded systems. Experiments conducted on public dataset VEDAI and our collected datasets show that our model has a higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods such as ResNet, Faster RCNN, ComNet, ViT, YOLOv5, SMPNet, and DPNetV3. Experiments on the embedded computer Jetson AGX show that our model achieves a real-time computation speed with a stability rate of over 90%.
Vision Transformer (ViT) self-attention mechanism is characterized by feature collapse in deeper layers, resulting in the vanishing of low-level visual features. However, such features can be helpful to accurately represent and identify elements within an image and increase the accuracy and robustness of vision-based recognition systems. Following this rationale, we propose a novel residual attention learning method for improving ViT-based architectures, increasing their visual feature diversity and model robustness. In this way, the proposed network can capture and preserve significant low-level features, providing more details about the elements within the scene being analyzed. The effectiveness and robustness of the presented method are evaluated on five image classification benchmarks, including ImageNet1k, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flowers-102, and Oxford-IIIT Pet, achieving improved performances. Additionally, experiments on the COCO2017 dataset show that the devised approach discovers and incorporates semantic and spatial relationships for object detection and instance segmentation when implemented into spatial-aware transformer models.
Semi-supervised 3D object detection is a promising yet under-explored direction to reduce data annotation costs, especially for cluttered indoor scenes. A few prior works, such as SESS and 3DIoUMatch, attempt to solve this task by utilizing a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples. However, the availability of unlabeled samples in the 3D domain is relatively limited compared to its 2D counterpart due to the greater effort required to collect 3D data. Moreover, the loose consistency regularization in SESS and restricted pseudo-label selection strategy in 3DIoUMatch lead to either low-quality supervision or a limited amount of pseudo labels. To address these issues, we present a novel Dual-Perspective Knowledge Enrichment approach named DPKE for semi-supervised 3D object detection. Our DPKE enriches the knowledge of limited training data, particularly unlabeled data, from two perspectives: data-perspective and feature-perspective. Specifically, from the data-perspective, we propose a class-probabilistic data augmentation method that augments the input data with additional instances based on the varying distribution of class probabilities. Our DPKE achieves feature-perspective knowledge enrichment by designing a geometry-aware feature matching method that regularizes feature-level similarity between object proposals from the student and teacher models. Extensive experiments on the two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DPKE achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches under various label ratio conditions. The source code will be made available to the public.
Object Detection (OD) has proven to be a significant computer vision method in extracting localized class information and has multiple applications in the industry. Although many of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) OD models perform well on medium and large sized objects, they seem to under perform on small objects. In most of the industrial use cases, it is difficult to collect and annotate data for small objects, as it is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Additionally, those datasets are likely to be unbalanced and often result in an inefficient model convergence. To tackle this challenge, this study presents a novel approach that injects additional data points to improve the performance of the OD models. Using synthetic data generation, the difficulties in data collection and annotations for small object data points can be minimized and to create a dataset with balanced distribution. This paper discusses the effects of a simple proportional class-balancing technique, to enable better anchor matching of the OD models. A comparison was carried out on the performances of the SOTA OD models: YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD, for combinations of real and synthetic datasets within an industrial use case.
Few-shot object detection(FSOD) aims to design methods to adapt object detectors efficiently with only few annotated samples. Fine-tuning has been shown to be an effective and practical approach. However, previous works often take the classical base-novel two stage fine-tuning procedure but ignore the implicit stability-plasticity contradiction among different modules. Specifically, the random re-initialized classifiers need more plasticity to adapt to novel samples. The other modules inheriting pre-trained weights demand more stability to reserve their class-agnostic knowledge. Regular fine-tuning which couples the optimization of these two parts hurts the model generalization in FSOD scenarios. In this paper, we find that this problem is prominent in the end-to-end object detector Sparse R-CNN for its multi-classifier cascaded architecture. We propose to mitigate this contradiction by a new three-stage fine-tuning procedure by introducing an addtional plasticity classifier fine-tuning(PCF) stage. We further design the multi-source ensemble(ME) technique to enhance the generalization of the model in the final fine-tuning stage. Extensive experiments verify that our method is effective in regularizing Sparse R-CNN, outperforming previous methods in the FSOD benchmark.