15,534 research outputs found
Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones
Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019
Meso-scale FDM material layout design strategies under manufacturability constraints and fracture conditions
In the manufacturability-driven design (MDD) perspective, manufacturability of the product or system is the most important of the design requirements. In addition to being able to ensure that complex designs (e.g., topology optimization) are manufacturable with a given process or process family, MDD also helps mechanical designers to take advantage of unique process-material effects generated during manufacturing. One of the most recognizable examples of this comes from the scanning-type family of additive manufacturing (AM) processes; the most notable and familiar member of this family is the fused deposition modeling (FDM) or fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. This process works by selectively depositing uniform, approximately isotropic beads or elements of molten thermoplastic material (typically structural engineering plastics) in a series of pre-specified traces to build each layer of the part. There are many interesting 2-D and 3-D mechanical design problems that can be explored by designing the layout of these elements. The resulting structured, hierarchical material (which is both manufacturable and customized layer-by-layer within the limits of the process and material) can be defined as a manufacturing process-driven structured material (MPDSM). This dissertation explores several practical methods for designing these element layouts for 2-D and 3-D meso-scale mechanical problems, focusing ultimately on design-for-fracture. Three different fracture conditions are explored: (1) cases where a crack must be prevented or stopped, (2) cases where the crack must be encouraged or accelerated, and (3) cases where cracks must grow in a simple pre-determined pattern. Several new design tools, including a mapping method for the FDM manufacturability constraints, three major literature reviews, the collection, organization, and analysis of several large (qualitative and quantitative) multi-scale datasets on the fracture behavior of FDM-processed materials, some new experimental equipment, and the refinement of a fast and simple g-code generator based on commercially-available software, were developed and refined to support the design of MPDSMs under fracture conditions. The refined design method and rules were experimentally validated using a series of case studies (involving both design and physical testing of the designs) at the end of the dissertation. Finally, a simple design guide for practicing engineers who are not experts in advanced solid mechanics nor process-tailored materials was developed from the results of this project.U of I OnlyAuthor's request
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems
Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art.
In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too.
We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them.
We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions.
Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems.
Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants
Audio-Visual Automatic Speech Recognition Towards Education for Disabilities
Education is a fundamental right that enriches everyone’s life. However, physically challenged people often debar from the general and advanced education system. Audio-Visual Automatic Speech Recognition (AV-ASR) based system is useful to improve the education of physically challenged people by providing hands-free computing. They can communicate to the learning system through AV-ASR. However, it is challenging to trace the lip correctly for visual modality. Thus, this paper addresses the appearance-based visual feature along with the co-occurrence statistical measure for visual speech recognition. Local Binary Pattern-Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP) and Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) is proposed for visual speech information. The experimental results show that the proposed system achieves 76.60 % accuracy for visual speech and 96.00 % accuracy for audio speech recognition
Copy-paste data augmentation for domain transfer on traffic signs
City streets carry a lot of information that can be exploited to improve the quality of the services the citizens receive. For example, autonomous vehicles need to act accordingly to all the element that are nearby the vehicle itself, like pedestrians, traffic signs and other vehicles. It is also possible to use such information for smart city applications, for example to predict and analyze the traffic or pedestrian flows.
Among all the objects that it is possible to find in a street, traffic signs are very important because of the information they carry. This information can in fact be exploited both for autonomous driving and for smart city applications. Deep learning and, more generally, machine learning models however need huge quantities to learn. Even though modern models are very good at gener- alizing, the more samples the model has, the better it can generalize between different samples.
Creating these datasets organically, namely with real pictures, is a very tedious task because of the wide variety of signs available in the whole world and especially because of all the possible light, orientation conditions and con- ditions in general in which they can appear. In addition to that, it may not be easy to collect enough samples for all the possible traffic signs available, cause some of them may be very rare to find.
Instead of collecting pictures manually, it is possible to exploit data aug- mentation techniques to create synthetic datasets containing the signs that are needed. Creating this data synthetically allows to control the distribution and the conditions of the signs in the datasets, improving the quality and quantity of training data that is going to be used. This thesis work is about using copy-paste data augmentation to create synthetic data for the traffic sign recognition task
Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Multi-modal Models during Fine-tuning
Spurious correlations that degrade model generalization or lead the model to
be right for the wrong reasons are one of the main robustness concerns for
real-world deployments. However, mitigating these correlations during
pre-training for large-scale models can be costly and impractical, particularly
for those without access to high-performance computing resources. This paper
proposes a novel approach to address spurious correlations during fine-tuning
for a given domain of interest. With a focus on multi-modal models (e.g.,
CLIP), the proposed method leverages different modalities in these models to
detect and explicitly set apart spurious attributes from the affected class,
achieved through a multi-modal contrastive loss function that expresses
spurious relationships through language. Our experimental results and in-depth
visualizations on CLIP show that such an intervention can effectively i)
improve the model's accuracy when spurious attributes are not present, and ii)
directs the model's activation maps towards the actual class rather than the
spurious attribute when present. In particular, on the Waterbirds dataset, our
algorithm achieved a worst-group accuracy 23% higher than ERM on CLIP with a
ResNet-50 backbone, and 32% higher on CLIP with a ViT backbone, while
maintaining the same average accuracy as ERM
VIVE3D: Viewpoint-Independent Video Editing using 3D-Aware GANs
We introduce VIVE3D, a novel approach that extends the capabilities of
image-based 3D GANs to video editing and is able to represent the input video
in an identity-preserving and temporally consistent way. We propose two new
building blocks. First, we introduce a novel GAN inversion technique
specifically tailored to 3D GANs by jointly embedding multiple frames and
optimizing for the camera parameters. Second, besides traditional semantic face
edits (e.g. for age and expression), we are the first to demonstrate edits that
show novel views of the head enabled by the inherent properties of 3D GANs and
our optical flow-guided compositing technique to combine the head with the
background video. Our experiments demonstrate that VIVE3D generates
high-fidelity face edits at consistent quality from a range of camera
viewpoints which are composited with the original video in a temporally and
spatially consistent manner.Comment: CVPR 2023. Project webpage and video available at
http://afruehstueck.github.io/vive3
CEERS Key Paper IV: Galaxies at are Bluer than They Appear -- Characterizing Galaxy Stellar Populations from Rest-Frame micron Imaging
We present results from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Survey (CEERS) on
the stellar-population parameters for 28 galaxies with redshifts using
imaging data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mid-Infrared Instrument
(MIRI) combined with data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space
Telescope. The JWST/MIRI 5.6 and 7.7 m data extend the coverage of the
rest-frame spectral-energy distribution (SED) to nearly 1 micron for galaxies
in this redshift range. By modeling the galaxies' SEDs the MIRI data show that
the galaxies have, on average, rest-frame UV (1600 \r{A}) -band colors
0.4 mag bluer than derived when using photometry that lacks MIRI. Therefore,
the galaxies have lower (stellar)-mass-to-light ratios. The MIRI data reduce
the stellar masses by dex at (a
factor of 1.8) and 0.37 dex at (a factor of 2.3). This also reduces the
star-formation rates (SFRs) by
dex at and 0.27 dex at . The MIRI data also improve constraints
on the allowable stellar mass formed in early star-formation. We model this
using a star-formation history that includes both a "burst' at and a
slowly varying ("delayed-") model. The MIRI data reduce the allowable
stellar mass by 0.6 dex at and by 1 dex at . Applying
these results globally, this reduces the cosmic stellar-mass density by an
order of magnitude in the early universe (). Therefore, observations
of rest-frame 1 m are paramount for constraining the stellar-mass
build-up in galaxies at very high-redshifts.Comment: Updated with accepted ApJ version. Part of the CEERS Focus Issue. 27
pages, many figures (4 Figure Sets, available upon reasonable request
Deep Unrestricted Document Image Rectification
In recent years, tremendous efforts have been made on document image
rectification, but existing advanced algorithms are limited to processing
restricted document images, i.e., the input images must incorporate a complete
document. Once the captured image merely involves a local text region, its
rectification quality is degraded and unsatisfactory. Our previously proposed
DocTr, a transformer-assisted network for document image rectification, also
suffers from this limitation. In this work, we present DocTr++, a novel unified
framework for document image rectification, without any restrictions on the
input distorted images. Our major technical improvements can be concluded in
three aspects. Firstly, we upgrade the original architecture by adopting a
hierarchical encoder-decoder structure for multi-scale representation
extraction and parsing. Secondly, we reformulate the pixel-wise mapping
relationship between the unrestricted distorted document images and the
distortion-free counterparts. The obtained data is used to train our DocTr++
for unrestricted document image rectification. Thirdly, we contribute a
real-world test set and metrics applicable for evaluating the rectification
quality. To our best knowledge, this is the first learning-based method for the
rectification of unrestricted document images. Extensive experiments are
conducted, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our
method. We hope our DocTr++ will serve as a strong baseline for generic
document image rectification, prompting the further advancement and application
of learning-based algorithms. The source code and the proposed dataset are
publicly available at https://github.com/fh2019ustc/DocTr-Plus
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