98,002 research outputs found
A machine learning-based method for the large-scale evaluation of the qualities of the urban environment
Given the present size of modern cities, it is beyond the perceptual capacity of most people to develop a good knowledge about the qualities of the urban space at every street corner. Correspondingly, for planners, it is also difficult to accurately answer questions such as ‘where the quality of the physical environment is the most dilapidated in the city that regeneration should be given first consideration’ and ‘in fast urbanising cities, how is the city appearance changing’. To address this issue, in the present study, we present a computer vision method that contains three machine learning models for the large-scale and automatic evaluation on the qualities of the urban environment by leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and wide-coverage street view images. From various physical qualities that have been identified by previous research to be important for the urban visual experience, we choose two key qualities, the construction and maintenance quality of building facade and the continuity of street wall, to be measured in this research. To test the validity of the proposed method, we compare the machine scores with public rating scores collected on-site from 752 passers-by at 56 locations in the city. We show that the machine learning models can produce a medium-to-good estimation of people's real experience, and the modelling results can be applied in many ways by researchers, planners and local residents.This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51478232), Independent Research Project of Tsinghua University (Grant No. 20131089262) and a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council (CSC No. 201306210039)
Driven to Distraction: Self-Supervised Distractor Learning for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry in Urban Environments
We present a self-supervised approach to ignoring "distractors" in camera
images for the purposes of robustly estimating vehicle motion in cluttered
urban environments. We leverage offline multi-session mapping approaches to
automatically generate a per-pixel ephemerality mask and depth map for each
input image, which we use to train a deep convolutional network. At run-time we
use the predicted ephemerality and depth as an input to a monocular visual
odometry (VO) pipeline, using either sparse features or dense photometric
matching. Our approach yields metric-scale VO using only a single camera and
can recover the correct egomotion even when 90% of the image is obscured by
dynamic, independently moving objects. We evaluate our robust VO methods on
more than 400km of driving from the Oxford RobotCar Dataset and demonstrate
reduced odometry drift and significantly improved egomotion estimation in the
presence of large moving vehicles in urban traffic.Comment: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018.
Video summary: http://youtu.be/ebIrBn_nc-
Multimodal Classification of Urban Micro-Events
In this paper we seek methods to effectively detect urban micro-events. Urban
micro-events are events which occur in cities, have limited geographical
coverage and typically affect only a small group of citizens. Because of their
scale these are difficult to identify in most data sources. However, by using
citizen sensing to gather data, detecting them becomes feasible. The data
gathered by citizen sensing is often multimodal and, as a consequence, the
information required to detect urban micro-events is distributed over multiple
modalities. This makes it essential to have a classifier capable of combining
them. In this paper we explore several methods of creating such a classifier,
including early, late, hybrid fusion and representation learning using
multimodal graphs. We evaluate performance on a real world dataset obtained
from a live citizen reporting system. We show that a multimodal approach yields
higher performance than unimodal alternatives. Furthermore, we demonstrate that
our hybrid combination of early and late fusion with multimodal embeddings
performs best in classification of urban micro-events
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State-of-the-art on research and applications of machine learning in the building life cycle
Fueled by big data, powerful and affordable computing resources, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to buildings research for the past decades and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This study systematically surveyed how machine learning has been applied at different stages of building life cycle. By conducting a literature search on the Web of Knowledge platform, we found 9579 papers in this field and selected 153 papers for an in-depth review. The number of published papers is increasing year by year, with a focus on building design, operation, and control. However, no study was found using machine learning in building commissioning. There are successful pilot studies on fault detection and diagnosis of HVAC equipment and systems, load prediction, energy baseline estimate, load shape clustering, occupancy prediction, and learning occupant behaviors and energy use patterns. None of the existing studies were adopted broadly by the building industry, due to common challenges including (1) lack of large scale labeled data to train and validate the model, (2) lack of model transferability, which limits a model trained with one data-rich building to be used in another building with limited data, (3) lack of strong justification of costs and benefits of deploying machine learning, and (4) the performance might not be reliable and robust for the stated goals, as the method might work for some buildings but could not be generalized to others. Findings from the study can inform future machine learning research to improve occupant comfort, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience of buildings, as well as to inspire young researchers in the field to explore multidisciplinary approaches that integrate building science, computing science, data science, and social science
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