SegVoxelNet: Exploring Semantic Context and Depth-aware Features for 3D Vehicle Detection from Point Cloud
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；School of EECS, Peking University（北京大学电子信息工程学院）；Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University（北京大学深圳研究生院）
Hongwei Yi, Shaoshuai Shi, Mingyu Ding, Jiankai Sun, Kui Xu, Hui Zhou, Zhe Wang, Sheng Li, Guoping Wang
3D vehicle detection based on point cloud is a challenging task in real-world applications such as autonomous driving. Despite significant progress has been made, we observe two aspects to be further improved. First, the semantic context information in LiDAR is seldom explored in previous works, which may help identify ambiguous vehicles. Second, the distribution of point cloud on vehicles varies continuously with increasing depths, which may not be well modeled by a single model. In this work, we propose a unified model SegVoxelNet to address the above two problems. A semantic context encoder is proposed to leverage the free-of-charge semantic segmentation masks in the bird's eye view. Suspicious regions could be highlighted while noisy regions are suppressed by this module. To better deal with vehicles at different depths, a novel depth-aware head is designed to explicitly model the distribution differences and each part of the depth-aware head is made to focus on its own target detection range. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives in both accuracy and efficiency with point cloud as input only.
University of Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
Motion prediction (MP) of multiple agents is a crucial task in arbitrarily complex environments, from social robots to self-driving cars. Current approaches tackle this problem using end-to-end networks, where the input data is usually a rendered top-view of the scene and the past trajectories of all the agents; leveraging this information is a must to obtain optimal performance. In that sense, a reliable Autonomous Driving (AD) system must produce reasonable predictions on time, however, despite many of these approaches use simple ConvNets and LSTMs, models might not be efficient enough for r…
Autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles' perception algorithms can encounter situations with erroneous object detection, such as misclassification of objects on the road, which can lead to safety violations and potentially fatal consequences. While there has been substantial work in the robustness of object detection algorithms and online metric learning, there is little research on benchmarking scoring metrics to determine any possible indicators of potential misclassification. An emphasis is put on exploring the potential of taking these scoring metrics online in order to allow the AV to mak…
Waabi；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Modern self-driving perception systems have been shown to improve upon processing complementary inputs such as LiDAR with images. In isolation, 2D images have been found to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Yet, there have been limited studies on the adversarial robustness of multi-modal models that fuse LiDAR features with image features. Furthermore, existing works do not consider physically realizable perturbations that are consistent across the input modalities. In this paper, we showcase practical susceptibilities of multi-sensor detection by placing an adversarial object on…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）；National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)（国立科技大学（NUST））；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a fundamental yet challenging task for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The core reasons are the extreme viewpoint changes, and limited computational power onboard a UAV which restricts the applicability of robust but computation intensive state-of-the-art VPR methods. In this context, a viable approach is to use local image descriptors for performing VPR as these can be computed relatively efficiently without the need of any special hardware, such as a GPU. However, the choice of a local feature descriptor is not trivial and calls for a detailed investiga…
AINS: Affordable Indoor Navigation Solution via Line Color Identification Using Mono-Camera for Autonomous Vehicles
Sukkur IBA University（苏库尔IBA大学）；IBA Community College, Naushahro Feroze（IBA社区学院（瑙谢罗费罗兹））；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；Kathir College of Engineering（卡蒂尔工程学院）
Huaqiao University（华侨大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Shanghai Institute of Micro-system and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）
Existing vehicle re-identification methods commonly use spatial pooling operations to aggregate feature maps extracted via off-the-shelf backbone networks. They ignore exploring the spatial significance of feature maps, eventually degrading the vehicle re-identification performance. In this paper, firstly, an innovative spatial graph network (SGN) is proposed to elaborately explore the spatial significance of feature maps. The SGN stacks multiple spatial graphs (SGs). Each SG assigns feature map's elements as nodes and utilizes spatial neighborhood relationships to determine edges among nodes.…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
We present a new learning-based framework to recover vehicle pose in SO(3) from a single RGB image. In contrast to previous works that map from local appearance to observation angles, we explore a progressive approach by extracting meaningful Intermediate Geometrical Representations (IGRs) to estimate egocentric vehicle orientation. This approach features a deep model that transforms perceived intensities to IGRs, which are mapped to a 3D representation encoding object orientation in the camera coordinate system. Core problems are what IGRs to use and how to learn them more effectively. We ans…
Tracking many vehicles in wide coverage aerial imagery is crucial for understanding events in a large field of view. Most approaches aim to associate detections from frame differencing into tracks. However, slow or stopped vehicles result in long-term missing detections and further cause tracking discontinuities. Relying merely on appearance clue to recover missing detections is difficult as targets are extremely small and in grayscale. In this paper, we address the limitations of detection association methods by coupling it with a local context tracker (LCT), which does not rely on motion det…
Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) is an active task due to its importance in large-scale intelligent monitoring in smart cities. Despite the rapid progress in recent years, most existing methods handle vehicle Re-ID task in a supervised manner, which is both time and labor-consuming and limits their application to real-life scenarios. Recently, unsupervised person Re-ID methods achieve impressive performance by exploring domain adaption or clustering-based techniques. However, one cannot directly generalize these methods to vehicle Re-ID since vehicle images present huge appearance variations …
University of Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
The design of a safe and reliable Autonomous Driving stack (ADS) is one of the most challenging tasks of our era. These ADS are expected to be driven in highly dynamic environments with full autonomy, and a reliability greater than human beings. In that sense, to efficiently and safely navigate through arbitrarily complex traffic scenarios, ADS must have the ability to forecast the future trajectories of surrounding actors. Current state-of-the-art models are typically based on Recurrent, Graph and Convolutional networks, achieving noticeable results in the context of vehicle prediction. In th…
This paper shows how to improve the real-time object detection in complex robotics applications, by exploring new visual features as AdaBoost weak classifiers. These new features are symmetric Haar filters (enforcing global horizontal and vertical symmetry) and N-connexity control points. Experimental evaluation on a car database show that the latter appear to provide the best results for the vehicle-detection problem.
Huaqiao University（华侨大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Transformers are more and more popular in computer vision, which treat an image as a sequence of patches and learn robust global features from the sequence. However, pure transformers are not entirely suitable for vehicle re-identification because vehicle re-identification requires both robust global features and discriminative local features. For that, a graph interactive transformer (GiT) is proposed in this paper. In the macro view, a list of GiT blocks are stacked to build a vehicle re-identification model, in where graphs are to extract discriminative local features within patches and tra…
3D multi-object tracking in LiDAR point clouds is a key ingredient for self-driving vehicles. Existing methods are predominantly based on the tracking-by-detection pipeline and inevitably require a heuristic matching step for the detection association. In this paper, we present SimTrack to simplify the hand-crafted tracking paradigm by proposing an end-to-end trainable model for joint detection and tracking from raw point clouds. Our key design is to predict the first-appear location of each object in a given snippet to get the tracking identity and then update the location based on motion est…
Vehicle-centric Perception via Multimodal Structured Pre-training
Information Materials and Intelligent Sensing Laboratory of Anhui Province（安徽省信息材料与智能感知实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）；the School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
3D object detection based on monocular camera data is a key enabler for autonomous driving. The task however, is ill-posed due to lack of depth information in 2D images. Recent deep learning methods show promising results to recover depth information from single images by learning priors about the environment. Several competing strategies tackle this problem. In addition to the network design, the major difference of these competing approaches lies in using a supervised or self-supervised optimization loss function, which require different data and ground truth information. In this paper, we e…
