In this letter, we present a novel markerless 3D human motion capture (MoCap) system for unstructured, outdoor environments that uses a team of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with on-board RGB cameras and computation. Existing methods are limited by calibrated cameras and off-line processing. Thus, we present the first method (AirPose) to estimate human pose and shape using images captured by multiple extrinsically uncalibrated flying cameras. AirPose itself calibrates the cameras relative to the person instead of relying on any pre-calibration. It uses distributed neural networks running on each UAV that communicate viewpoint-independent information with each other about the person (i.e., their 3D shape and articulated pose). The person's shape and pose are parameterized using the SMPL-X body model, resulting in a compact representation, that minimizes communication between the UAVs. The network is trained using synthetic images of realistic virtual environments, and fine-tuned on a small set of real images. We also introduce an optimization-based post-processing method (AirPose$^{+}$) for offline applications that require higher MoCap quality. We make our method's code and data available for research at https://github.com/robot-perception-group/AirPose. A video describing the approach and results is available at https://youtu.be/xLYe1TNHsfs.
Benchmarking Visual-Inertial Deep Multimodal Fusion for Relative Pose Regression and Odometry-aided Absolute Pose Regression
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Technical University of Dortmund（多特蒙德工业大学）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
With an ever-widening domain of aerial robotic applications, including many mission critical tasks such as disaster response operations, search and rescue missions and infrastructure inspections taking place in GPS-denied environments, the need for reliable autonomous operation of aerial robots has become crucial. Operating in GPS-denied areas aerial robots rely on a multitude of sensors to localize and navigate. Visible spectrum cameras are the most commonly used sensors due to their low cost and weight. However, in environments that are visually-degraded such as in conditions of poor illumin…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
This paper proposes a Rotation-equivariant Attention Feature Fusion Pyramid Networks for Aerial Object Detection named ReAFFPN. ReAFFPN aims at improving the effect of rotation-equivariant features fusion between adjacent layers which suffers from the semantic and scale discontinuity. Due to the particularity of rotational equivariant convolution, general methods are unable to achieve their original effect while ensuring rotation equivariance of the network. To solve this problem, we design a new Rotation-equivariant Channel Attention which has the ability to both generate channel attention an…
A Semi-supervised Segmentation Fusion algorithm is proposed using consensus and distributed learning. The aim of Unsupervised Segmentation Fusion (USF) is to achieve a consensus among different segmentation outputs obtained from different segmentation algorithms by computing an approximate solution to the NP problem with less computational complexity. Semi-supervision is incorporated in USF using a new algorithm called Semi-supervised Segmentation Fusion (SSSF). In SSSF, side information about the co-occurrence of pixels in the same or different segments is formulated as the constraints of a c…
This paper presents our contribution to the DeepGlobe Building Detection Challenge. We enhanced the SpaceNet Challenge winning solution by proposing a new fusion strategy based on a deep combiner using segmentation both results of different CNN and input data to segment. Segmentation results for all cities have been significantly improved (between 1% improvement over the baseline for the smallest one to more than 7% for the largest one). The separation of adjacent buildings should be the next enhancement made to the solution.
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机学院）；Systems and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学系统与上海数据科学重点实验室）；Shanghai Insitute of Intelligent Electroics & Systems（上海智能电子与系统研究所）；Bytedance AI Lab（字节跳动AI实验室）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Automatic map extraction is of great importance to urban computing and location-based services. Aerial image and GPS trajectory data refer to two different data sources that could be leveraged to generate the map, although they carry different types of information. Most previous works on data fusion between aerial images and data from auxiliary sensors do not fully utilize the information of both modalities and hence suffer from the issue of information loss. We propose a deep convolutional neural network called DeepDualMapper which fuses the aerial image and trajectory data in a more seamless…
Autonomous Robots Lab, University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学雷诺分校自主机器人实验室）
This paper proposes a method for tight fusion of visual, depth and inertial data in order to extend robotic capabilities for navigation in GPS-denied, poorly illuminated, and texture-less environments. Visual and depth information are fused at the feature detection and descriptor extraction levels to augment one sensing modality with the other. These multimodal features are then further integrated with inertial sensor cues using an extended Kalman filter to estimate the robot pose, sensor bias terms, and landmark positions simultaneously as part of the filter state. As demonstrated through a s…
UAVs showed great efficiency on scanning bridge decks surface by taking a single shot or through stitching a couple of overlaid still images. If potential surface deficits are identified through aerial images, subsequent ground inspections can be scheduled. This two-phase inspection procedure showed great potentials on increasing field inspection productivity. Since aerial and ground inspection images are taken at different scales, a tool to properly fuse these multi-scale images is needed for improving the current bridge deck condition monitoring practice. In response to this need a data fusi…
Object detection and classification using aerial images is a challenging task as the information regarding targets are not abundant. Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) images can be used for Automatic Target Recognition(ATR) systems as it can operate in all-weather conditions and in low light settings. But, SAR images contain salt and pepper noise(speckle noise) that cause hindrance for the deep learning models to extract meaningful features. Using just aerial view Electro-optical(EO) images for ATR systems may also not result in high accuracy as these images are of low resolution and also do not p…
Hyperspectral cameras can provide unique spectral signatures for consistently distinguishing materials that can be used to solve surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hyperspectral likelihood maps-aided tracking method (HLT) inspired by an adaptive hyperspectral sensor. A moving object tracking system generally consists of registration, object detection, and tracking modules. We focus on the target detection part and remove the necessity to build any offline classifiers and tune a large amount of hyperparameters, instead learning a generative target model in an online…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；MO Intelligence（MO智能公司）；Tencent（腾讯）
Deep learning approaches for Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) have proven successful, but they rarely focus on incorporating robust fusion strategies for dealing with imperfect input sensory data. We propose a novel end-to-end selective sensor fusion framework for monocular VIO, which fuses monocular images and inertial measurements in order to estimate the trajectory whilst improving robustness to real-life issues, such as missing and corrupted data or bad sensor synchronization. In particular, we propose two fusion modalities based on different masking strategies: deterministic soft fusion and…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. In this work, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from mult…
In this paper, we propose a transfer-learning based model construction technique for the aerial scene classification problem. The core of our technique is a layer selection strategy, named ReLU-Based Feature Fusion (RBFF), that extracts feature maps from a pretrained CNN-based single-object image classification model, namely MobileNetV2, and constructs a model for the aerial scene classification task. RBFF stacks features extracted from the batch normalization layer of a few selected blocks of MobileNetV2, where the candidate blocks are selected based on the characteristics of the ReLU activat…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. Here, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from multiple sen…
Existing deep learning based methods effectively prompt the performance of aerial scene classification. However, due to the large amount of parameters and computational cost, it is rather difficult to apply these methods to multiple real-time remote sensing applications such as on-board data preception on drones and satellites. In this paper, we address this task by developing a light-weight ConvNet named multi-stage duplex fusion network (MSDF-Net). The key idea is to use parameters as little as possible while obtaining as strong as possible scene representation capability. To this end, a res…
Due to their ability to offer more comprehensive information than data from a single view, multi-view (multi-source, multi-modal, multi-perspective, etc.) data are being used more frequently in remote sensing tasks. However, as the number of views grows, the issue of data quality becomes more apparent, limiting the potential benefits of multi-view data. Although recent deep neural network (DNN) based models can learn the weight of data adaptively, a lack of research on explicitly quantifying the data quality of each view when fusing them renders these models inexplicable, performing unsatisfac…
Object detection is a basic and important task in the field of aerial image processing and has gained much attention in computer vision. However, previous aerial image object detection approaches have insufficient use of scene semantic information between different regions of large-scale aerial images. In addition, complex background and scale changes make it difficult to improve detection accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a relationship representation network for object detection in aerial images (RelationRS): 1) Firstly, multi-scale features are fused and enhanced by a dual relat…
Visual question answering (VQA) is an important and challenging multimodal task in computer vision. Recently, a few efforts have been made to bring VQA task to aerial images, due to its potential real-world applications in disaster monitoring, urban planning, and digital earth product generation. However, not only the huge variation in the appearance, scale and orientation of the concepts in aerial images, but also the scarcity of the well-annotated datasets restricts the development of VQA in this domain. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, HRVQA, which provides collected 53512 aerial …
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence（KIOS研究与创新卓越中心）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
Deep learning-based algorithms can provide state-of-the-art accuracy for remote sensing technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones, potentially enhancing their remote sensing capabilities for many emergency response and disaster management applications. In particular, UAVs equipped with camera sensors can operating in remote and difficult to access disaster-stricken areas, analyze the image and alert in the presence of various calamities such as collapsed buildings, flood, or fire in order to faster mitigate their effects on the environment and on human population. However, th…
SFFR: Spatial-Frequency Feature Reconstruction for Multispectral Aerial Object Detection
School of Computer, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学计算机学院）；School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University（江苏大学电气与信息工程学院）；School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）
Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) methods are mainly designed and evaluated on natural image datasets such as Pascal VOC and MS COCO. However, it is not clear whether the best methods for natural images are also the best for aerial images. Furthermore, direct comparison of performance between FSOD methods is difficult due to the wide variety of detection frameworks and training strategies. Therefore, we propose a benchmarking framework that provides a flexible environment to implement and compare attention-based FSOD methods. The proposed framework focuses on attention mechanisms and is divided…
The visual entities in cross-view images exhibit drastic domain changes due to the difference in viewpoints each set of images is captured from. Existing state-of-the-art methods address the problem by learning view-invariant descriptors for the images. We propose a novel method for solving this task by exploiting the generative powers of conditional GANs to synthesize an aerial representation of a ground level panorama and use it to minimize the domain gap between the two views. The synthesized image being from the same view as the target image helps the network to preserve important cues in …
ONERA（法国航空航天实验室）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Université Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学）
Aerial or satellite imagery is a great source for land surface analysis, which might yield land use maps or elevation models. In this investigation, we present a neural network framework for learning semantics and local height together. We show how this joint multi-task learning benefits to each task on the large dataset of the 2018 Data Fusion Contest. Moreover, our framework also yields an uncertainty map which allows assessing the prediction of the model. Code is available at https://github.com/marcelampc/mtl_aerial_images .
Fusion or Confusion? Assessing the impact of visible-thermal image fusion for automated wildlife detection
Department of Applied Geomatics, Université de Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学应用地理信息学系）；Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science, McGill University（麦吉尔大学魁北克生物多样性科学中心）；Ministère de l’Environnement, de la Lutte contre les Changements Climatiques, de la Faune et des Parcs (MELCCFP)（魁北克省环境、气候变化、野生动物和公园部）；Centre d'enseignement et de recherche en foresterie de Sainte-Foy（圣福瓦林业教学与研究中心）
DUFormer: Solving Power Line Detection Task in Aerial Images using Semantic Segmentation
Autel Robotics（道通智能）；Fujian College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学福建学院）；Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院福建物质结构研究所泉州装备制造研究所）；Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University（福建农林大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；University of Technology（理工大学）；U.S. Naval Research Laboratory（美国海军研究实验室）
Detection of moving objects such as vehicles in videos acquired from an airborne camera is very useful for video analytics applications. Using fast low power algorithms for onboard moving object detection would also provide region of interest-based semantic information for scene content aware image compression. This would enable more efficient and flexible communication link utilization in lowbandwidth airborne cloud computing networks. Despite recent advances in both UAV or drone platforms and imaging sensor technologies, vehicle detection from aerial video remains challenging due to small ob…
Object detection using aerial drone imagery has received a great deal of attention in recent years. While visible light images are adequate for detecting objects in most scenarios, thermal cameras can extend the capabilities of object detection to night-time or occluded objects. As such, RGB and Infrared (IR) fusion methods for object detection are useful and important. One of the biggest challenges in applying deep learning methods to RGB/IR object detection is the lack of available training data for drone IR imagery, especially at night. In this paper, we develop several strategies for creat…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Aerial scene classification remains challenging as: 1) the size of key objects in determining the scene scheme varies greatly; 2) many objects irrelevant to the scene scheme are often flooded in the image. Hence, how to effectively perceive the region of interests (RoIs) from a variety of sizes and build more discriminative representation from such complicated object distribution is vital to understand an aerial scene. In this paper, we propose a novel all grains, one scheme (AGOS) framework to tackle these challenges. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to extend the classic mu…
Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots
ARL DCIST CRA；NSF Grant CCR-2112665（NSF CCR-2112665）；NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Grant No. DGE-1845298（NSF DGE-1845298）；IoT4Ag Engineering Research Center
Small Object Detection Model with Spatial Laplacian Pyramid Attention and Multi-Scale Features Enhancement in Aerial Images
Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Chinese Information Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University（教育部计算智能与中文信息处理重点实验室，计算机与信息技术学院，山西大学）
A unified three-branch deep learning framework for automated detection and counting of wildlife in aerial imagery
School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学地理空间工程与科学学院）；Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente（特温特大学地球信息科学与对地观测学院）；Boma and Badingilo National Parks, African Parks（博马和巴丁吉洛国家公园，非洲公园组织）；Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学生态与进化生物学系）；Lolldaiga Hills Research Programme（洛尔迪加山研究项目）；School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork（科克大学环境研究所生物、地球与环境科学学院）
