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Author Naveen Onkarappa
Title Optical Flow in Driver Assistance Systems Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Motion perception is one of the most important attributes of the human brain. Visual motion perception consists in inferring speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual inputs. Analogously, computer vision is assisted by motion cues in the scene. Motion detection in computer vision is useful in solving problems such as segmentation, depth from motion, structure from motion, compression, navigation and many others. These problems are common in several applications, for instance, video surveillance, robot navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the most widely used techniques for motion detection is the optical flow estimation. The work in this thesis attempts to make optical flow suitable for the requirements and conditions of driving scenarios. In this context, a novel space-variant representation called reverse log-polar representation is proposed that is shown to be better than the traditional log-polar space-variant representation for ADAS. The space-variant representations reduce the amount of data to be processed. Another major contribution in this research is related to the analysis of the influence of specific characteristics from driving scenarios on the optical flow accuracy. Characteristics such as vehicle speed and
road texture are considered in the aforementioned analysis. From this study, it is inferred that the regularization weight has to be adapted according to the required error measure and for different speeds and road textures. It is also shown that polar represented optical flow suits driving scenarios where predominant motion is translation. Due to the requirements of such a study and by the lack of needed datasets a new synthetic dataset is presented; it contains: i) sequences of different speeds and road textures in an urban scenario; ii) sequences with complex motion of an on-board camera; and iii) sequences with additional moving vehicles in the scene. The ground-truth optical flow is generated by the ray-tracing technique. Further, few applications of optical flow in ADAS are shown. Firstly, a robust RANSAC based technique to estimate horizon line is proposed. Then, an egomotion estimation is presented to compare the proposed space-variant representation with the classical one. As a final contribution, a modification in the regularization term is proposed that notably improves the results
in the ADAS applications. This adaptation is evaluated using a state of the art optical flow technique. The experiments on a public dataset (KITTI) validate the advantages of using the proposed modification.
Address Bellaterra
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-940902-1-9 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Nav2013 Serial 2447
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Author Jiaolong Xu; Sebastian Ramos; David Vazquez; Antonio Lopez
Title DA-DPM Pedestrian Detection Type Conference Article
Year 2013 Publication ICCV Workshop on Reconstruction meets Recognition Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference ICCVW-RR
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ XRV2013 Serial 2569
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Author Mohammad Rouhani; Angel Sappa
Title The Richer Representation the Better Registration Type Journal Article
Year 2013 Publication IEEE Transactions on Image Processing Abbreviated Journal TIP
Volume 22 Issue 12 Pages 5036-5049
Keywords
Abstract In this paper, the registration problem is formulated as a point to model distance minimization. Unlike most of the existing works, which are based on minimizing a point-wise correspondence term, this formulation avoids the correspondence search that is time-consuming. In the first stage, the target set is described through an implicit function by employing a linear least squares fitting. This function can be either an implicit polynomial or an implicit B-spline from a coarse to fine representation. In the second stage, we show how the obtained implicit representation is used as an interface to convert point-to-point registration into point-to-implicit problem. Furthermore, we show that this registration distance is smooth and can be minimized through the Levengberg-Marquardt algorithm. All the formulations presented for both stages are compact and easy to implement. In addition, we show that our registration method can be handled using any implicit representation though some are coarse and others provide finer representations; hence, a tradeoff between speed and accuracy can be set by employing the right implicit function. Experimental results and comparisons in 2D and 3D show the robustness and the speed of convergence of the proposed approach.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1057-7149 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ RoS2013 Serial 2665
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Author German Ros
Title Visual Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding Where and What Type Book Whole
Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Making Ground Autonomous Vehicles (GAVs) a reality as a service for the society is one of the major scientific and technological challenges of this century. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles include reducing accidents, improving traffic congestion and better usage of road infrastructures, among others. These vehicles must operate in our cities, towns and highways, dealing with many different types of situations while respecting traffic rules and protecting human lives. GAVs are expected to deal with all types of scenarios and situations, coping with an uncertain and chaotic world.
Therefore, in order to fulfill these demanding requirements GAVs need to be endowed with the capability of understanding their surrounding at many different levels, by means of affordable sensors and artificial intelligence. This capacity to understand the surroundings and the current situation that the vehicle is involved in is called scene understanding. In this work we investigate novel techniques to bring scene understanding to autonomous vehicles by combining the use of cameras as the main source of information—due to their versatility and affordability—and algorithms based on computer vision and machine learning. We investigate different degrees of understanding of the scene, starting from basic geometric knowledge about where is the vehicle within the scene. A robust and efficient estimation of the vehicle location and pose with respect to a map is one of the most fundamental steps towards autonomous driving. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness and computational efficiency, proposing key insights to improve current solutions. Then we advance to higher levels of abstraction to discover what is in the scene, by recognizing and parsing all the elements present on a driving scene, such as roads, sidewalks, pedestrians, etc. We investigate this problem known as semantic segmentation, proposing new approaches to improve recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. We cover these points by focusing on key aspects such as: (i) how to leverage computation moving semantics to an offline process, (ii) how to train compact architectures based on deconvolutional networks to achieve their maximum potential, (iii) how to use virtual worlds in combination with domain adaptation to produce accurate models in a cost-effective fashion, and (iv) how to use transfer learning techniques to prepare models to new situations. We finally extend the previous level of knowledge enabling systems to reasoning about what has change in a scene with respect to a previous visit, which in return allows for efficient and cost-effective map updating.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa;Julio Guerrero;Antonio Lopez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-1-8 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ros2016 Serial 2860
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Author Azadeh S. Mozafari; David Vazquez; Mansour Jamzad; Antonio Lopez
Title Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt:Model-Transfer Domain Adaptation for Random Forest Type Miscellaneous
Year 2016 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian detection; Random Forest
Abstract Random Forest (RF) is a successful paradigm for learning classifiers due to its ability to learn from large feature spaces and seamlessly integrate multi-class classification, as well as the achieved accuracy and processing efficiency. However, as many other classifiers, RF requires domain adaptation (DA) provided that there is a mismatch between the training (source) and testing (target) domains which provokes classification degradation. Consequently, different RF-DA methods have been proposed, which not only require target-domain samples but revisiting the source-domain ones, too. As novelty, we propose three inherently different methods (Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt) that only require the learned source-domain RF and a relatively few target-domain samples for DA, i.e. source-domain samples do not need to be available. To assess the performance of our proposals we focus on image-based object detection, using the pedestrian detection problem as challenging proof-of-concept. Moreover, we use the RF with expert nodes because it is a competitive patch-based pedestrian model. We test our Node-, Path- and Tree-Adapt methods in standard benchmarks, showing that DA is largely achieved.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number ADAS @ adas @ MVJ2016 Serial 2868
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Author Yi Xiao; Felipe Codevilla; Akhil Gurram; Onay Urfalioglu; Antonio Lopez
Title Multimodal end-to-end autonomous driving Type Journal Article
Year 2020 Publication IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Abbreviated Journal TITS
Volume Issue Pages 1-11
Keywords
Abstract A crucial component of an autonomous vehicle (AV) is the artificial intelligence (AI) is able to drive towards a desired destination. Today, there are different paradigms addressing the development of AI drivers. On the one hand, we find modular pipelines, which divide the driving task into sub-tasks such as perception and maneuver planning and control. On the other hand, we find end-to-end driving approaches that try to learn a direct mapping from input raw sensor data to vehicle control signals. The later are relatively less studied, but are gaining popularity since they are less demanding in terms of sensor data annotation. This paper focuses on end-to-end autonomous driving. So far, most proposals relying on this paradigm assume RGB images as input sensor data. However, AVs will not be equipped only with cameras, but also with active sensors providing accurate depth information (e.g., LiDARs). Accordingly, this paper analyses whether combining RGB and depth modalities, i.e. using RGBD data, produces better end-to-end AI drivers than relying on a single modality. We consider multimodality based on early, mid and late fusion schemes, both in multisensory and single-sensor (monocular depth estimation) settings. Using the CARLA simulator and conditional imitation learning (CIL), we show how, indeed, early fusion multimodality outperforms single-modality.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ XCG2020 Serial 3490
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Author Gemma Rotger
Title Lifelike Humans: Detailed Reconstruction of Expressive Human Faces Type Book Whole
Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Developing human-like digital characters is a challenging task since humans are used to recognizing our fellows, and find the computed generated characters inadequately humanized. To fulfill the standards of the videogame and digital film productions it is necessary to model and animate these characters the most closely to human beings. However, it is an arduous and expensive task, since many artists and specialists are required to work on a single character. Therefore, to fulfill these requirements we found an interesting option to study the automatic creation of detailed characters through inexpensive setups. In this work, we develop novel techniques to bring detailed characters by combining different aspects that stand out when developing realistic characters, skin detail, facial hairs, expressions, and microexpressions. We examine each of the mentioned areas with the aim of automatically recover each of the parts without user interaction nor training data. We study the problems for their robustness but also for the simplicity of the setup, preferring single-image with uncontrolled illumination and methods that can be easily computed with the commodity of a standard laptop. A detailed face with wrinkles and skin details is vital to develop a realistic character. In this work, we introduce our method to automatically describe facial wrinkles on the image and transfer to the recovered base face. Then we advance to facial hair recovery by resolving a fitting problem with a novel parametrization model. As of last, we develop a mapping function that allows transfer expressions and microexpressions between different meshes, which provides realistic animations to our detailed mesh. We cover all the mentioned points with the focus on key aspects as (i) how to describe skin wrinkles in a simple and straightforward manner, (ii) how to recover 3D from 2D detections, (iii) how to recover and model facial hair from 2D to 3D, (iv) how to transfer expressions between models holding both skin detail and facial hair, (v) how to perform all the described actions without training data nor user interaction. In this work, we present our proposals to solve these aspects with an efficient and simple setup. We validate our work with several datasets both synthetic and real data, prooving remarkable results even in challenging cases as occlusions as glasses, thick beards, and indeed working with different face topologies like single-eyed cyclops.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Felipe Lumbreras;Antonio Agudo
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-3-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Rot2021 Serial 3513
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Author Akhil Gurram
Title Monocular Depth Estimation for Autonomous Driving Type Book Whole
Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract 3D geometric information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are equipped with calibrated sensor suites. As part of these suites, we can find LiDARs, which are expensive active sensors in charge of providing the 3D geometric information. Depending on the operational conditions for the AV, calibrated stereo rigs may be also sufficient for obtaining 3D geometric information, being these rigs less expensive and easier to install than LiDARs. However, ensuring a proper maintenance and calibration of these types of sensors is not trivial. Accordingly, there is an increasing interest on performing monocular depth estimation (MDE) to obtain 3D geometric information on-board. MDE is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Moreover, a set of single cameras with MDE capabilities would still be a cheap solution for on-board perception, relatively easy to integrate and maintain in an AV.
Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Accordingly, the overall goal of this PhD is to study methods for improving CNN-based MDE accuracy under different training settings. More specifically, this PhD addresses different research questions that are described below. When we started to work in this PhD, state-of-theart methods for MDE were already based on CNNs. In fact, a promising line of work consisted in using image-based semantic supervision (i.e., pixel-level class labels) while training CNNs for MDE using LiDAR-based supervision (i.e., depth). It was common practice to assume that the same raw training data are complemented by both types of supervision, i.e., with depth and semantic labels. However, in practice, it was more common to find heterogeneous datasets with either only depth supervision or only semantic supervision. Therefore, our first work was to research if we could train CNNs for MDE by leveraging depth and semantic information from heterogeneous datasets. We show that this is indeed possible, and we surpassed the state-of-the-art results on MDE at the time we did this research. To achieve our results, we proposed a particular CNN architecture and a new training protocol.
After this research, it was clear that the upper-bound setting to train CNN-based MDE models consists in using LiDAR data as supervision. However, it would be cheaper and more scalable if we would be able to train such models from monocular sequences. Obviously, this is far more challenging, but worth to research. Training MDE models using monocular sequences is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. To alleviate these problems, we perform MDE by virtual-world supervision and real-world SfM self-supervision. We call our proposalMonoDEVSNet. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging
virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision, as well as addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. MonoDEVSNet outperformed previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences. We have publicly released MonoDEVSNet at <https://github.com/HMRC-AEL/MonoDEVSNet>.
Finally, since MDE is performed to produce 3D information for being used in downstream tasks related to on-board perception. We also address the question of whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator for future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. By using 3D object detection on point clouds as proxy of on-board perception, we conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods which reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect.
Address March, 2022
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Onay Urfalioglu
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-0-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gur2022 Serial 3712
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Author Idoia Ruiz
Title Deep Metric Learning for re-identification, tracking and hierarchical novelty detection Type Book Whole
Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Metric learning refers to the problem in machine learning of learning a distance or similarity measurement to compare data. In particular, deep metric learning involves learning a representation, also referred to as embedding, such that in the embedding space data samples can be compared based on the distance, directly providing a similarity measure. This step is necessary to perform several tasks in computer vision. It allows to perform the classification of images, regions or pixels, re-identification, out-of-distribution detection, object tracking in image sequences and any other task that requires computing a similarity score for their solution. This thesis addresses three specific problems that share this common requirement. The first one is person re-identification. Essentially, it is an image retrieval task that aims at finding instances of the same person according to a similarity measure. We first compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency, classical metric learning to basic deep learning based methods for this problem. In this context, we also study network distillation as a strategy to optimize the trade-off between accuracy and speed at inference time. The second problem we contribute to is novelty detection in image classification. It consists in detecting samples of novel classes, i.e. never seen during training. However, standard novelty detection does not provide any information about the novel samples besides they are unknown. Aiming at more informative outputs, we take advantage from the hierarchical taxonomies that are intrinsic to the classes. We propose a metric learning based approach that leverages the hierarchical relationships among classes during training, being able to predict the parent class for a novel sample in such hierarchical taxonomy. Our third contribution is in multi-object tracking and segmentation. This joint task comprises classification, detection, instance segmentation and tracking. Tracking can be formulated as a retrieval problem to be addressed with metric learning approaches. We tackle the existing difficulty in academic research that is the lack of annotated benchmarks for this task. To this matter, we introduce the problem of weakly supervised multi-object tracking and segmentation, facing the challenge of not having available ground truth for instance segmentation. We propose a synergistic training strategy that benefits from the knowledge of the supervised tasks that are being learnt simultaneously.
Address July, 2022
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor Joan Serrat
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-4-8 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Rui2022 Serial 3717
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Author M. Altillawi; S. Li; S.M. Prakhya; Z. Liu; Joan Serrat
Title Implicit Learning of Scene Geometry From Poses for Global Localization Type Journal Article
Year 2024 Publication IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Abbreviated Journal ROBOTAUTOMLET
Volume 9 Issue 2 Pages 955-962
Keywords Localization; Localization and mapping; Deep learning for visual perception; Visual learning
Abstract Global visual localization estimates the absolute pose of a camera using a single image, in a previously mapped area. Obtaining the pose from a single image enables many robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. Inspired by latest advances in deep learning, many existing approaches directly learn and regress 6 DoF pose from an input image. However, these methods do not fully utilize the underlying scene geometry for pose regression. The challenge in monocular relocalization is the minimal availability of supervised training data, which is just the corresponding 6 DoF poses of the images. In this letter, we propose to utilize these minimal available labels (i.e., poses) to learn the underlying 3D geometry of the scene and use the geometry to estimate the 6 DoF camera pose. We present a learning method that uses these pose labels and rigid alignment to learn two 3D geometric representations ( X, Y, Z coordinates ) of the scene, one in camera coordinate frame and the other in global coordinate frame. Given a single image, it estimates these two 3D scene representations, which are then aligned to estimate a pose that matches the pose label. This formulation allows for the active inclusion of additional learning constraints to minimize 3D alignment errors between the two 3D scene representations, and 2D re-projection errors between the 3D global scene representation and 2D image pixels, resulting in improved localization accuracy. During inference, our model estimates the 3D scene geometry in camera and global frames and aligns them rigidly to obtain pose in real-time. We evaluate our work on three common visual localization datasets, conduct ablation studies, and show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art regression methods' pose accuracy on all datasets.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 2377-3766 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Serial 3857
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Author Maciej Wielgosz; Antonio Lopez; Muhamad Naveed Riaz
Title CARLA-BSP: a simulated dataset with pedestrians Type Miscellaneous
Year 2023 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract We present a sample dataset featuring pedestrians generated using the ARCANE framework, a new framework for generating datasets in CARLA (0.9.13). We provide use cases for pedestrian detection, autoencoding, pose estimation, and pose lifting. We also showcase baseline results.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ WLN2023 Serial 3866
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Author Akhil Gurram; Antonio Lopez
Title On the Metrics for Evaluating Monocular Depth Estimation Type Miscellaneous
Year 2023 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is performed to produce 3D information that can be used in downstream tasks such as those related to on-board perception for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) or driver assistance. Therefore, a relevant arising question is whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator of the accuracy of future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. We address this question in this paper. In particular, we take the task of 3D object detection on point clouds as a proxy of on-board perception. We train and test state-of-the-art 3D object detectors using 3D point clouds coming from MDE models. We confront the ranking of object detection results with the ranking given by the depth estimation metrics of the MDE models. We conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods that reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect. Among the different metrics, the absolute relative (abs-rel) error seems to be the best for that purpose.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GuL2023 Serial 3867
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Author Yi Xiao; Felipe Codevilla; Diego Porres; Antonio Lopez
Title Scaling Vision-Based End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Multi-View Attention Learning Type Conference Article
Year 2023 Publication International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract On end-to-end driving, human driving demonstrations are used to train perception-based driving models by imitation learning. This process is supervised on vehicle signals (e.g., steering angle, acceleration) but does not require extra costly supervision (human labeling of sensor data). As a representative of such vision-based end-to-end driving models, CILRS is commonly used as a baseline to compare with new driving models. So far, some latest models achieve better performance than CILRS by using expensive sensor suites and/or by using large amounts of human-labeled data for training. Given the difference in performance, one may think that it is not worth pursuing vision-based pure end-to-end driving. However, we argue that this approach still has great value and potential considering cost and maintenance. In this paper, we present CIL++, which improves on CILRS by both processing higher-resolution images using a human-inspired HFOV as an inductive bias and incorporating a proper attention mechanism. CIL++ achieves competitive performance compared to models which are more costly to develop. We propose to replace CILRS with CIL++ as a strong vision-based pure end-to-end driving baseline supervised by only vehicle signals and trained by conditional imitation learning.
Address Detroit; USA; October 2023
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference IROS
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ XCP2023 Serial 3930
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Author Jose Luis Gomez
Title Synth-to-real semi-supervised learning for visual tasks Type Book Whole
Year 2023 Publication Going beyond Classification Problems for the Continual Learning of Deep Neural Networks Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The curse of data labeling is a costly bottleneck in supervised deep learning, where large amounts of labeled data are needed to train intelligent systems. In onboard perception for autonomous driving, this cost corresponds to the labeling of raw data from sensors such as cameras, LiDARs, RADARs, etc. Therefore, synthetic data with automatically generated ground truth (labels) has aroused as a reliable alternative for training onboard perception models.
However, synthetic data commonly suffers from synth-to-real domain shift, i.e., models trained on the synthetic domain do not show their achievable accuracy when performing in the real world. This shift needs to be addressed by techniques falling in the realm of domain adaptation (DA).
The semi-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm can be followed to address DA. In this case, a model is trained using source data with labels (here synthetic) and leverages minimal knowledge from target data (here the real world) to generate pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels help the training process to reduce the gap between the source and the target domains. In general, we can assume accessing both, pseudo-labels and a few amounts of human-provided labels for the target-domain data. However, the most interesting and challenging setting consists in assuming that we do not have human-provided labels at all. This setting is known as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). This PhD focuses on applying SSL to the UDA setting, for onboard visual tasks related to autonomous driving. We start by addressing the synth-to-real UDA problem on onboard vision-based object detection (pedestrians and cars), a critical task for autonomous driving and driving assistance. In particular, we propose to apply an SSL technique known as co-training, which we adapt to work with deep models that process a multi-modal input. The multi-modality consists of the visual appearance of the images (RGB) and their monocular depth estimation. The synthetic data we use as the source domain contains both, object bounding boxes and depth information. This prior knowledge is the
starting point for the co-training technique, which iteratively labels unlabeled real-world data and uses such pseudolabels (here bounding boxes with an assigned object class) to progressively improve the labeling results. Along this
process, two models collaborate to automatically label the images, in a way that one model compensates for the errors of the other, so avoiding error drift. While this automatic labeling process is done offline, the resulting pseudolabels can be used to train object detection models that must perform in real-time onboard a vehicle. We show that multi-modal co-training improves the labeling results compared to single-modal co-training, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Given the success of co-training in the context of object detection, we have also adapted this technique to a more crucial and challenging visual task, namely, onboard semantic segmentation. In fact, providing labels for a single image
can take from 30 to 90 minutes for a human labeler, depending on the content of the image. Thus, developing automatic labeling techniques for this visual task is of great interest to the automotive industry. In particular, the new co-training framework addresses synth-to-real UDA by an initial stage of self-training. Intermediate models arising from this stage are used to start the co-training procedure, for which we have elaborated an accurate collaboration policy between the two models performing the automatic labeling. Moreover, our co-training seamlessly leverages datasets from different synthetic domains. In addition, the co-training procedure is agnostic to the loss function used to train the semantic segmentation models which perform the automatic labeling. We achieve state-of-the-art results on publicly available benchmark datasets, again, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Finally, on the ground of our previous experience, we have designed and implemented a new SSL technique for UDA in the context of visual semantic segmentation. In this case, we mimic the labeling methodology followed by human labelers. In particular, rather than labeling full images at a time, categories of semantic classes are defined and only those are labeled in a labeling pass. In fact, different human labelers can become specialists in labeling different categories. Afterward, these per-category-labeled layers are combined to provide fully labeled images. Our technique is inspired by this methodology since we perform synth-to-real UDA per category, using the self-training stage previously developed as part of our co-training framework. The pseudo-labels obtained for each category are finally
fused to obtain fully automatically labeled images. In this context, we have also contributed to the development of a new photo-realistic synthetic dataset based on path-tracing rendering. Our new SSL technique seamlessly leverages publicly available synthetic datasets as well as this new one to obtain state-of-the-art results on synth-to-real UDA for semantic segmentation. We show that the new dataset allows us to reach better labeling accuracy than previously existing datasets, at the same time that it complements well them when combined. Moreover, we also show that the new human-inspired SSL technique outperforms co-training.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gom2023 Serial 3961
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Author Yi Xiao
Title Advancing Vision-based End-to-End Autonomous Driving Type Book Whole
Year 2023 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract In autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI) processes the traffic environment to drive the vehicle to a desired destination. Currently, there are different paradigms that address the development of AI-enabled drivers. On the one hand, we find modular pipelines, which divide the driving task into sub-tasks such as perception, maneuver planning, and control. On the other hand, we find end-to-end driving approaches that attempt to learn the direct mapping of raw data from input sensors to vehicle control signals. The latter are relatively less studied but are gaining popularity as they are less demanding in terms of data labeling. Therefore, in this thesis, our goal is to investigate end-to-end autonomous driving.
We propose to evaluate three approaches to tackle the challenge of end-to-end
autonomous driving. First, we focus on the input, considering adding depth information as complementary to RGB data, in order to mimic the human being’s
ability to estimate the distance to obstacles. Notice that, in the real world, these depth maps can be obtained either from a LiDAR sensor, or a trained monocular
depth estimation module, where human labeling is not needed. Then, based on
the intuition that the latent space of end-to-end driving models encodes relevant
information for driving, we use it as prior knowledge for training an affordancebased driving model. In this case, the trained affordance-based model can achieve good performance while requiring less human-labeled data, and it can provide interpretability regarding driving actions. Finally, we present a new pure vision-based end-to-end driving model termed CIL++, which is trained by imitation learning.
CIL++ leverages modern best practices, such as a large horizontal field of view and
a self-attention mechanism, which are contributing to the agent’s understanding of
the driving scene and bringing a better imitation of human drivers. Using training
data without any human labeling, our model yields almost expert performance in
the CARLA NoCrash benchmark and could rival SOTA models that require large amounts of human-labeled data.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-126409-4-6 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes (up) ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Xia2023 Serial 3964
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