Object detection is a critical component of a self-driving system, tasked with inferring the current states of the surrounding traffic actors. While there exist a number of studies on the problem of inferring the position and shape of vehicle actors, understanding actors' orientation remains a challenge for existing state-of-the-art detectors. Orientation is an important property for downstream modules of an autonomous system, particularly relevant for motion prediction of stationary or reversing actors where current approaches struggle. We focus on this task and present a method that extends the existing models that perform joint object detection and motion prediction, allowing us to more accurately infer vehicle orientations. In addition, the approach is able to quantify prediction uncertainty, outputting the probability that the inferred orientation is flipped, which allows for improved motion prediction and safer autonomous operations. Empirical results show the benefits of the approach, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on the open-sourced nuScenes data set.
In this paper, we explore the use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to improve the perception and motion forecasting performance of self-driving vehicles. By intelligently aggregating the information received from multiple nearby vehicles, we can observe the same scene from different viewpoints. This allows us to see through occlusions and detect actors at long range, where the observations are very sparse or non-existent. We also show that our approach of sending compressed deep feature map activations achieves high accuracy while satisfying communication bandwidth requirements.
This paper aims to design a 3D object detection model from 2D images taken by monocular cameras by combining the estimated bird's-eye view elevation map and the deep representation of object features. The proposed model has a pre-trained ResNet-50 network as its backend network and three more branches. The model first builds a bird's-eye view elevation map to estimate the depth of the object in the scene and by using that estimates the object's 3D bounding boxes. We have trained and evaluate it on two major datasets: a syntactic dataset and the KIITI dataset.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Human body orientation estimation (HBOE) is widely applied into various applications, including robotics, surveillance, pedestrian analysis and autonomous driving. Although many approaches have been addressing the HBOE problem from specific under-controlled scenes to challenging in-the-wild environments, they assume human instances are already detected and take a well cropped sub-image as the input. This setting is less efficient and prone to errors in real application, such as crowds of people. In the paper, we propose a single-stage end-to-end trainable framework for tackling the HBOE proble…
University of Sao Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Pedestrians and vehicles often share the road in complex inner city traffic. This leads to interactions between the vehicle and pedestrians, with each affecting the other's motion. In order to create robust methods to reason about pedestrian behavior and to design interfaces of communication between self-driving cars and pedestrians we need to better understand such interactions. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach to implicitly model pedestrians' interactions with vehicles, to better predict pedestrian behavior. We propose a LSTM model that takes as input the past trajectories of…
Vehicle re-identification is a challenging task due to high intra-class variances and small inter-class variances. In this work, we focus on the failure cases caused by similar background and shape. They pose serve bias on similarity, making it easier to neglect fine-grained information. To reduce the bias, we propose an approach named VOC-ReID, taking the triplet vehicle-orientation-camera as a whole and reforming background/shape similarity as camera/orientation re-identification. At first, we train models for vehicle, orientation and camera re-identification respectively. Then we use orient…
In recent years, there is an influx of deep learning models for 3D vehicle object detection. However, little attention was paid to orientation prediction. Existing research work proposed various vehicle orientation representation methods for deep learning, however a holistic, systematic review has not been conducted. Through our experiments, we categorize and compare the accuracy performance of various existing orientation representations using the KITTI 3D object detection dataset, and propose a new form of orientation representation: Tricosine. Among these, the 2D Cartesian-based representat…
Vehicle re-identification (re-ID) focuses on matching images of the same vehicle across different cameras. It is fundamentally challenging because differences between vehicles are sometimes subtle. While several studies incorporate spatial-attention mechanisms to help vehicle re-ID, they often require expensive keypoint labels or suffer from noisy attention mask if not trained with expensive labels. In this work, we propose a dedicated Semantics-guided Part Attention Network (SPAN) to robustly predict part attention masks for different views of vehicles given only image-level semantic labels d…
The estimation of the orientation of an observed vehicle relative to an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) from monocular camera data is an important building block in estimating its 6 DoF pose. Current Deep Learning based solutions for placing a 3D bounding box around this observed vehicle are data hungry and do not generalize well. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of monocular visual odometry for the self-supervised fine-tuning of a model for orientation estimation pre-trained on a reference domain. Specifically, while transitioning from a virtual dataset (vKITTI) to nuScenes, we recover up to 70%…
This paper studies efficient means for dealing with intra-category diversity in object detection. Strategies for occlusion and orientation handling are explored by learning an ensemble of detection models from visual and geometrical clusters of object instances. An AdaBoost detection scheme is employed with pixel lookup features for fast detection. The analysis provides insight into the design of a robust vehicle detection system, showing promise in terms of detection performance and orientation estimation accuracy.
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Academia Sinica（台湾中央研究院）
In recent years, attention models have been extensively used for person and vehicle re-identification. Most re-identification methods are designed to focus attention on key-point locations. However, depending on the orientation, the contribution of each key-point varies. In this paper, we present a novel dual-path adaptive attention model for vehicle re-identification (AAVER). The global appearance path captures macroscopic vehicle features while the orientation conditioned part appearance path learns to capture localized discriminative features by focusing attention on the most informative ke…
National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院）；Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Nebraska-Lincoln（内布拉斯加大学林肯分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Twentieth Century Fox（二十世纪福克斯）；Starfleet Academy（星际舰队学院）；Tyrell Inc.（泰伦公司）
In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scale…
In this paper, we present a novel approach, called Deep MANTA (Deep Many-Tasks), for many-task vehicle analysis from a given image. A robust convolutional network is introduced for simultaneous vehicle detection, part localization, visibility characterization and 3D dimension estimation. Its architecture is based on a new coarse-to-fine object proposal that boosts the vehicle detection. Moreover, the Deep MANTA network is able to localize vehicle parts even if these parts are not visible. In the inference, the network's outputs are used by a real time robust pose estimation algorithm for fine …
We address the problem of estimating the pose and shape of vehicles from LiDAR scans, a common problem faced by the autonomous vehicle community. Recent work has tended to address pose and shape estimation separately in isolation, despite the inherent connection between the two. We investigate a method of jointly estimating shape and pose where a single encoding is learned from which shape and pose may be decoded in an efficient yet effective manner. We additionally introduce a novel joint pose and shape loss, and show that this joint training method produces better results than independently-…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of New Brunswick（新不伦瑞克大学）
Vehicle detection is a significant and challenging task in aerial remote sensing applications. Most existing methods detect vehicles with regular rectangle boxes and fail to offer the orientation of vehicles. However, the orientation information is crucial for several practical applications, such as the trajectory and motion estimation of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network, called rotatable region-based residual network (R$^3$-Net), to detect multi-oriented vehicles in aerial images and videos. More specially, R$^3$-Net is utilized to generate rotatable rectangular target…
Mannheim University of Applied Sciences（曼海姆应用科学大学）
In order to ensure safe autonomous driving, precise information about the conditions in and around the vehicle must be available. Accordingly, the monitoring of occupants and objects inside the vehicle is crucial. In the state-of-the-art, single or multiple deep neural networks are used for either object recognition, semantic segmentation, or human pose estimation. In contrast, we propose our Multitask Detection, Segmentation and Pose Estimation Network (MDSP) -- the first multitask network solving all these three tasks jointly in the area of occupancy monitoring. Due to the shared architectur…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Multi-class vehicle detection from airborne imagery with orientation estimation is an important task in the near and remote vision domains with applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant progress in object detection in ground imagery, but it is still in its infancy in airborne imagery, mostly due to the scarcity of diverse and large-scale datasets. Despite being a useful tool for different applications, current airborne datasets only partially reflect the challenges of real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce E…
National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；Sinovation Ventures AI Institute（创新工场人工智能研究院）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；UT Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Vehicle 3D extents and trajectories are critical cues for predicting the future location of vehicles and planning future agent ego-motion based on those predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel online framework for 3D vehicle detection and tracking from monocular videos. The framework can not only associate detections of vehicles in motion over time, but also estimate their complete 3D bounding box information from a sequence of 2D images captured on a moving platform. Our method leverages 3D box depth-ordering matching for robust instance association and utilizes 3D trajectory predictio…
Joint Orientation and Weight Optimization for Robust Watertight Surface Reconstruction via Dirichlet-Regularized Winding Fields
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；China University of Geosciences (Wuhan)（中国地质大学（武汉））；Shandong University（山东大学）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯大学）
Convolution is conventionally defined as a linear operation on functions of one or more variables which commutes with shifts. Group convolution generalizes the concept to linear operations on functions of group elements representing more general geometric transformations and which commute with those transformations. Since similarity transformation is the most general geometric transformation on images that preserves shape, the group convolution that is equivariant to similarity transformation is the most general shape preserving linear operator. Because similarity transformations have four fre…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）
We present a novel end-to-end framework named as GSNet (Geometric and Scene-aware Network), which jointly estimates 6DoF poses and reconstructs detailed 3D car shapes from single urban street view. GSNet utilizes a unique four-way feature extraction and fusion scheme and directly regresses 6DoF poses and shapes in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments show that our diverse feature extraction and fusion scheme can greatly improve model performance. Based on a divide-and-conquer 3D shape representation strategy, GSNet reconstructs 3D vehicle shape with great detail (1352 vertices and 2700…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Cross-view geo-localization is the problem of estimating the position and orientation (latitude, longitude and azimuth angle) of a camera at ground level given a large-scale database of geo-tagged aerial (e.g., satellite) images. Existing approaches treat the task as a pure location estimation problem by learning discriminative feature descriptors, but neglect orientation alignment. It is well-recognized that knowing the orientation between ground and aerial images can significantly reduce matching ambiguity between these two views, especially when the ground-level images have a limited Field …
Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算系）
Most realtime human pose estimation approaches are based on detecting joint positions. Using the detected joint positions, the yaw and pitch of the limbs can be computed. However, the roll along the limb, which is critical for application such as sports analysis and computer animation, cannot be computed as this axis of rotation remains unobserved. In this paper we therefore introduce orientation keypoints, a novel approach for estimating the full position and rotation of skeletal joints, using only single-frame RGB images. Inspired by how motion-capture systems use a set of point markers to e…
Leibniz Universität Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Twente（特温特大学）
State-of-the-art object detection approaches such as Fast/Faster R-CNN, SSD, or YOLO have difficulties detecting dense, small targets with arbitrary orientation in large aerial images. The main reason is that using interpolation to align RoI features can result in a lack of accuracy or even loss of location information. We present the Local-aware Region Convolutional Neural Network (LR-CNN), a novel two-stage approach for vehicle detection in aerial imagery. We enhance translation invariance to detect dense vehicles and address the boundary quantization issue amongst dense vehicles by aggregat…
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela（鲁尔凯拉国家理工学院）
Vision-based pose estimation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in unknown environments is a rapidly growing research area in the field of robot vision. The task becomes more complex when the only available sensor is a static single camera (monocular vision). In this regard, we propose a monocular vision assisted localization algorithm, that will help a UAV to navigate safely in indoor corridor environments. Always, the aim is to navigate the UAV through a corridor in the forward direction by keeping it at the center with no orientation either to the left or right side. The algorithm makes use …
In this paper we propose a traffic surveillance camera calibration method based on detection of pairs of vanishing points associated with vehicles in the traffic surveillance footage. To detect the vanishing points we propose a CNN which outputs heatmaps in which the positions of vanishing points are represented using the diamond space parametrization which enables us to detect vanishing points from the whole infinite projective space. From the detected pairs of vanishing points for multiple vehicles in a scene we establish the scene geometry by estimating the focal length of the camera and th…
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have been proven to be effective for various computer vision problems. In this work, we demonstrate its effectiveness on a continuous object orientation estimation task, which requires prediction of 0 to 360 degrees orientation of the objects. We do so by proposing and comparing three continuous orientation prediction approaches designed for the DCNNs. The first two approaches work by representing an orientation as a point on a unit circle and minimizing either L2 loss or angular difference loss. The third method works by first converting the continuou…
Today, one of the major challenges that autonomous vehicles are facing is the ability to drive in urban environments. Such a task requires communication between autonomous vehicles and other road users in order to resolve various traffic ambiguities. The interaction between road users is a form of negotiation in which the parties involved have to share their attention regarding a common objective or a goal (e.g. crossing an intersection), and coordinate their actions in order to accomplish it. In this literature review we aim to address the interaction problem between pedestrians and drivers (…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学）；General Motors（通用汽车公司）
We propose a robust method for estimating road curb 3D parameters (size, location, orientation) using a calibrated monocular camera equipped with a fisheye lens. Automatic curb detection and localization is particularly important in the context of Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), i.e. to prevent possible collision and damage of the vehicle's bumper during perpendicular and diagonal parking maneuvers. Combining 3D geometric reasoning with advanced vision-based detection methods, our approach is able to estimate the vehicle to curb distance in real time with mean accuracy of more than 9…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Line Corporation（Line公司）
Estimating the pose of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone is a challenging task. It is useful for many applications such as navigation, surveillance, tracking objects on the ground, and 3D reconstruction. In this work, we present a LiDAR-camera-based relative pose estimation method between a drone and a ground vehicle, using a LiDAR sensor and a fisheye camera on the vehicle's roof and another fisheye camera mounted under the drone. The LiDAR sensor directly observes the drone and measures its position, and the two cameras estimate the relative orientation using indirect observation of …
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…
