A machine learning approach to pedestrian detection for autonomous vehicles using High-Definition 3D Range Data

This article describes an automated sensor-based system to detect pedestrians in an autonomous vehicle application. Although the vehicle is equipped with a broad set of sensors, the article focuses on the processing of the information generated by a Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR sensor. The cloud of points generated by the sensor (more than 1 million points per revolution) is processed to detect pedestrians, by selecting cubic shapes and applying machine vision and machine learning algorithms to the XY, XZ, and YZ projections of the points contained in the cube. The work relates an exhaustive analysis of the performance of three different machine learning algorithms: k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Naïve Bayes classifier (NBC), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These algorithms have been trained with 1931 samples. The final performance of the method, measured a real traffic scenery, which contained 16 pedestrians and 469 samples of non-pedestrians, shows sensitivity (81.2%), accuracy (96.2%) and specificity (96.8%).This work was partially supported by ViSelTR (ref. TIN2012-39279) and cDrone (ref. TIN2013-45920-R) projects of the Spanish Government, and the “Research Programme for Groups of Scientific Excellence at Region of Murcia” of the Seneca Foundation (Agency for Science and Technology of the Region of Murcia—19895/GERM/15). 3D LIDAR has been funded by UPCA13-3E-1929 infrastructure projects of the Spanish Government. Diego Alonso wishes to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Subprograma Estatal de Movilidad, Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013–2016 for grant CAS14/00238

Eye in the Sky: Real-time Drone Surveillance System (DSS) for Violent Individuals Identification using ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning Network

Drone systems have been deployed by various law enforcement agencies to monitor hostiles, spy on foreign drug cartels, conduct border control operations, etc. This paper introduces a real-time drone surveillance system to identify violent individuals in public areas. The system first uses the Feature Pyramid Network to detect humans from aerial images. The image region with the human is used by the proposed ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning (SHDL) network for human pose estimation. The orientations between the limbs of the estimated pose are next used to identify the violent individuals. The proposed deep network can learn meaningful representations quickly using ScatterNet and structural priors with relatively fewer labeled examples. The system detects the violent individuals in real-time by processing the drone images in the cloud. This research also introduces the aerial violent individual dataset used for training the deep network which hopefully may encourage researchers interested in using deep learning for aerial surveillance. The pose estimation and violent individuals identification performance is compared with the state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: To Appear in the Efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision (ECV) workshop at IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018. Youtube demo at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYypJPJipY

LiDAR and Camera Detection Fusion in a Real Time Industrial Multi-Sensor Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance is a critical task in many applications, such as ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems), industrial automation and robotics. In an industrial automation setting, certain areas should be off limits to an automated vehicle for protection of people and high-valued assets. These areas can be quarantined by mapping (e.g., GPS) or via beacons that delineate a no-entry area. We propose a delineation method where the industrial vehicle utilizes a LiDAR {(Light Detection and Ranging)} and a single color camera to detect passive beacons and model-predictive control to stop the vehicle from entering a restricted space. The beacons are standard orange traffic cones with a highly reflective vertical pole attached. The LiDAR can readily detect these beacons, but suffers from false positives due to other reflective surfaces such as worker safety vests. Herein, we put forth a method for reducing false positive detection from the LiDAR by projecting the beacons in the camera imagery via a deep learning method and validating the detection using a neural network-learned projection from the camera to the LiDAR space. Experimental data collected at Mississippi State University's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) shows the effectiveness of the proposed system in keeping the true detection while mitigating false positives.Comment: 34 page