Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Dynamic Object Detection in Grid Maps

Grid maps are widely used in robotics to represent obstacles in the environment and differentiating dynamic objects from static infrastructure is essential for many practical applications. In this work, we present a methods that uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to infer whether grid cells are covering a moving object or not. Compared to tracking approaches, that use e.g. a particle filter to estimate grid cell velocities and then make a decision for individual grid cells based on this estimate, our approach uses the entire grid map as input image for a CNN that inspects a larger area around each cell and thus takes the structural appearance in the grid map into account to make a decision. Compared to our reference method, our concept yields a performance increase from 83.9% to 97.2%. A runtime optimized version of our approach yields similar improvements with an execution time of just 10 milliseconds.Comment: This is a shorter version of the masters thesis of Florian Piewak and it was accapted at IV 201

Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation

We introduce a new loss function for the weakly-supervised training of semantic image segmentation models based on three guiding principles: to seed with weak localization cues, to expand objects based on the information about which classes can occur in an image, and to constrain the segmentations to coincide with object boundaries. We show experimentally that training a deep convolutional neural network using the proposed loss function leads to substantially better segmentations than previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. We furthermore give insight into the working mechanism of our method by a detailed experimental study that illustrates how the segmentation quality is affected by each term of the proposed loss function as well as their combinations.Comment: ECCV 201

Learning a Hierarchical Latent-Variable Model of 3D Shapes

We propose the Variational Shape Learner (VSL), a generative model that learns the underlying structure of voxelized 3D shapes in an unsupervised fashion. Through the use of skip-connections, our model can successfully learn and infer a latent, hierarchical representation of objects. Furthermore, realistic 3D objects can be easily generated by sampling the VSL's latent probabilistic manifold. We show that our generative model can be trained end-to-end from 2D images to perform single image 3D model retrieval. Experiments show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the improved generalization of our proposed model over a range of tasks, performing better or comparable to various state-of-the-art alternatives.Comment: Accepted as oral presentation at International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 201

Deep Regionlets for Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel object detection framework named "Deep Regionlets" by establishing a bridge between deep neural networks and conventional detection schema for accurate generic object detection. Motivated by the abilities of regionlets for modeling object deformation and multiple aspect ratios, we incorporate regionlets into an end-to-end trainable deep learning framework. The deep regionlets framework consists of a region selection network and a deep regionlet learning module. Specifically, given a detection bounding box proposal, the region selection network provides guidance on where to select regions to learn the features from. The regionlet learning module focuses on local feature selection and transformation to alleviate local variations. To this end, we first realize non-rectangular region selection within the detection framework to accommodate variations in object appearance. Moreover, we design a "gating network" within the regionlet leaning module to enable soft regionlet selection and pooling. The Deep Regionlets framework is trained end-to-end without additional efforts. We perform ablation studies and conduct extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and Microsoft COCO datasets. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, such as RetinaNet and Mask R-CNN, even without additional segmentation labels.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 201

DC-SPP-YOLO: Dense Connection and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Based YOLO for Object Detection

Although YOLOv2 approach is extremely fast on object detection; its backbone network has the low ability on feature extraction and fails to make full use of multi-scale local region features, which restricts the improvement of object detection accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposed a DC-SPP-YOLO (Dense Connection and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Based YOLO) approach for ameliorating the object detection accuracy of YOLOv2. Specifically, the dense connection of convolution layers is employed in the backbone network of YOLOv2 to strengthen the feature extraction and alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem. Moreover, an improved spatial pyramid pooling is introduced to pool and concatenate the multi-scale local region features, so that the network can learn the object features more comprehensively. The DC-SPP-YOLO model is established and trained based on a new loss function composed of mean square error and cross entropy, and the object detection is realized. Experiments demonstrate that the mAP (mean Average Precision) of DC-SPP-YOLO proposed on PASCAL VOC datasets and UA-DETRAC datasets is higher than that of YOLOv2; the object detection accuracy of DC-SPP-YOLO is superior to YOLOv2 by strengthening feature extraction and using the multi-scale local region features.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, 9 table