38,614 research outputs found
A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"
Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation
and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective
and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions
(referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that
comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection,
landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology
that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking
"in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed
qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking
technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of
our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking
pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many
different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face
tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a)
generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic
model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c)
hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking
and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future
avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second
authorshi
Monte Carlo Localization in Hand-Drawn Maps
Robot localization is a one of the most important problems in robotics. Most
of the existing approaches assume that the map of the environment is available
beforehand and focus on accurate metrical localization. In this paper, we
address the localization problem when the map of the environment is not present
beforehand, and the robot relies on a hand-drawn map from a non-expert user. We
addressed this problem by expressing the robot pose in the pixel coordinate and
simultaneously estimate a local deformation of the hand-drawn map. Experiments
show that we are able to localize the robot in the correct room with a
robustness up to 80
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and
robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple
viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic
imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and
imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a
viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between
end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes,
and body pose. We train our representations using a metric learning loss, where
multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the
embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often
visually similar but functionally different. In other words, the model
simultaneously learns to recognize what is common between different-looking
images, and what is different between similar-looking images. This signal
causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint,
but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as
occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this
representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an
explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a
reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an
unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring
are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward
functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned
representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for
real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are
available at https://sermanet.github.io/imitat
Planar Odometry from a Radial Laser Scanner. A Range Flow-based Approach
In this paper we present a fast and precise method to estimate the planar motion of a lidar from consecutive range scans. For every scanned point we formulate the range flow constraint equation in terms of the sensor velocity, and
minimize a robust function of the resulting geometric constraints to obtain the motion estimate. Conversely to traditional
approaches, this method does not search for correspondences but performs dense scan alignment based on the scan gradients,
in the fashion of dense 3D visual odometry. The minimization problem is solved in a coarse-to-fine scheme to cope with large displacements, and a smooth filter based on the covariance of the estimate is employed to handle uncertainty in unconstraint scenarios (e.g. corridors). Simulated and real experiments have
been performed to compare our approach with two prominent scan matchers and with wheel odometry. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach which, along with its very low computational cost (0.9 milliseconds on a single CPU core), makes it suitable for those robotic applications that require planar odometry. For this purpose, we also provide the code so that the robotics community can benefit from it.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech. Spanish Government under project DPI2014-55826-R and the grant program FPI-MICINN 2012
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