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Felipe Codevilla, Eder Santana, Antonio Lopez and Adrien Gaidon. 2019. Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving. 18th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.9328–9337.
Abstract: Driving requires reacting to a wide variety of complex environment conditions and agent behaviors. Explicitly modeling each possible scenario is unrealistic. In contrast, imitation learning can, in theory, leverage data from large fleets of human-driven cars. Behavior cloning in particular has been successfully used to learn simple visuomotor policies end-to-end, but scaling to the full spectrum of driving behaviors remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark to experimentally investigate the scalability and limitations of behavior cloning. We show that behavior cloning leads to state-of-the-art results, executing complex lateral and longitudinal maneuvers, even in unseen environments, without being explicitly programmed to do so. However, we confirm some limitations of the behavior cloning approach: some well-known limitations (eg, dataset bias and overfitting), new generalization issues (eg, dynamic objects and the lack of a causal modeling), and training instabilities, all requiring further research before behavior cloning can graduate to real-world driving. The code, dataset, benchmark, and agent studied in this paper can be found at github.
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Jiaolong Xu, Peng Wang, Heng Yang and Antonio Lopez. 2019. Training a Binary Weight Object Detector by Knowledge Transfer for Autonomous Driving. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.2379–2384.
Abstract: Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet-and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.
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Simon Jégou, Michal Drozdzal, David Vazquez, Adriana Romero and Yoshua Bengio. 2017. The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu: Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Semantic Segmentation. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops.
Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions.
Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train.
In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets.
Keywords: Semantic Segmentation
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Daniel Hernandez, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez and Juan Carlos Moure. 2017. GPU-accelerated real-time stixel computation. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision.1054–1062.
Abstract: The Stixel World is a medium-level, compact representation of road scenes that abstracts millions of disparity pixels into hundreds or thousands of stixels. The goal of this work is to implement and evaluate a complete multi-stixel estimation pipeline on an embedded, energyefficient, GPU-accelerated device. This work presents a full GPU-accelerated implementation of stixel estimation that produces reliable results at 26 frames per second (real-time) on the Tegra X1 for disparity images of 1024×440 pixels and stixel widths of 5 pixels, and achieves more than 400 frames per second on a high-end Titan X GPU card.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; GPU; Stixel
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Jiaolong Xu, David Vazquez, Krystian Mikolajczyk and Antonio Lopez. 2016. Hierarchical online domain adaptation of deformable part-based models. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.5536–5541.
Abstract: We propose an online domain adaptation method for the deformable part-based model (DPM). The online domain adaptation is based on a two-level hierarchical adaptation tree, which consists of instance detectors in the leaf nodes and a category detector at the root node. Moreover, combined with a multiple object tracking procedure (MOT), our proposal neither requires target-domain annotated data nor revisiting the source-domain data for performing the source-to-target domain adaptation of the DPM. From a practical point of view this means that, given a source-domain DPM and new video for training on a new domain without object annotations, our procedure outputs a new DPM adapted to the domain represented by the video. As proof-of-concept we apply our proposal to the challenging task of pedestrian detection. In this case, each instance detector is an exemplar classifier trained online with only one pedestrian per frame. The pedestrian instances are collected by MOT and the hierarchical model is constructed dynamically according to the pedestrian trajectories. Our experimental results show that the adapted detector achieves the accuracy of recent supervised domain adaptation methods (i.e., requiring manually annotated targetdomain data), and improves the source detector more than 10 percentage points.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Marçal Rusiñol, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo and Josep Llados. 2011. Browsing Heterogeneous Document Collections by a Segmentation-Free Word Spotting Method. 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.63–67.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a segmentation-free word spotting method that is able to deal with heterogeneous document image collections. We propose a patch-based framework where patches are represented by a bag-of-visual-words model powered by SIFT descriptors. A later refinement of the feature vectors is performed by applying the latent semantic indexing technique. The proposed method performs well on both handwritten and typewritten historical document images. We have also tested our method on documents written in non-Latin scripts.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Theo Gevers and Antonio Lopez. 2010. Geographic Information for vision-based Road Detection. IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.621–626.
Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.
Keywords: road detection
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Yi Xiao, Felipe Codevilla, Diego Porres and Antonio Lopez. 2023. Scaling Vision-Based End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Multi-View Attention Learning. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
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.
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Lorenzo Porzi, Markus Hofinger, Idoia Ruiz, Joan Serrat, Samuel Rota Bulo and Peter Kontschieder. 2020. Learning Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation from Automatic Annotations. 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.6845–6854.
Abstract: In this work we contribute a novel pipeline to automatically generate training data, and to improve over state-of-the-art multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) methods. Our proposed track mining algorithm turns raw street-level videos into high-fidelity MOTS training data, is scalable and overcomes the need of expensive and time-consuming manual annotation approaches. We leverage state-of-the-art instance segmentation results in combination with optical flow predictions, also trained on automatically harvested training data. Our second major contribution is MOTSNet – a deep learning, tracking-by-detection architecture for MOTS – deploying a novel mask-pooling layer for improved object association over time. Training MOTSNet with our automatically extracted data leads to significantly improved sMOTSA scores on the novel KITTI MOTS dataset (+1.9%/+7.5% on cars/pedestrians), and MOTSNet improves by +4.1% over previously best methods on the MOTSChallenge dataset. Our most impressive finding is that we can improve over previous best-performing works, even in complete absence of manually annotated MOTS training data.
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Zhijie Fang and Antonio Lopez. 2018. Is the Pedestrian going to Cross? Answering by 2D Pose Estimation. IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.1271–1276.
Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.
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