Unsupervised 3D Pose Estimation with Geometric Self-Supervision

We present an unsupervised learning approach to recover 3D human pose from 2D skeletal joints extracted from a single image. Our method does not require any multi-view image data, 3D skeletons, correspondences between 2D-3D points, or use previously learned 3D priors during training. A lifting network accepts 2D landmarks as inputs and generates a corresponding 3D skeleton estimate. During training, the recovered 3D skeleton is reprojected on random camera viewpoints to generate new "synthetic" 2D poses. By lifting the synthetic 2D poses back to 3D and re-projecting them in the original camera view, we can define self-consistency loss both in 3D and in 2D. The training can thus be self supervised by exploiting the geometric self-consistency of the lift-reproject-lift process. We show that self-consistency alone is not sufficient to generate realistic skeletons, however adding a 2D pose discriminator enables the lifter to output valid 3D poses. Additionally, to learn from 2D poses "in the wild", we train an unsupervised 2D domain adapter network to allow for an expansion of 2D data. This improves results and demonstrates the usefulness of 2D pose data for unsupervised 3D lifting. Results on Human3.6M dataset for 3D human pose estimation demonstrate that our approach improves upon the previous unsupervised methods by 30% and outperforms many weakly supervised approaches that explicitly use 3D data

SleepyWheels: An Ensemble Model for Drowsiness Detection leading to Accident Prevention

Around 40 percent of accidents related to driving on highways in India occur due to the driver falling asleep behind the steering wheel. Several types of research are ongoing to detect driver drowsiness but they suffer from the complexity and cost of the models. In this paper, SleepyWheels a revolutionary method that uses a lightweight neural network in conjunction with facial landmark identification is proposed to identify driver fatigue in real time. SleepyWheels is successful in a wide range of test scenarios, including the lack of facial characteristics while covering the eye or mouth, the drivers varying skin tones, camera placements, and observational angles. It can work well when emulated to real time systems. SleepyWheels utilized EfficientNetV2 and a facial landmark detector for identifying drowsiness detection. The model is trained on a specially created dataset on driver sleepiness and it achieves an accuracy of 97 percent. The model is lightweight hence it can be further deployed as a mobile application for various platforms.Comment: 20 page

Spectral analysis for long-term robotic mapping

This paper presents a new approach to mobile robot mapping in long-term scenarios. So far, the environment models used in mobile robotics have been tailored to capture static scenes and dealt with the environment changes by means of ‘memory decay’. While these models keep up with slowly changing environments, their utilization in dynamic, real world environments is difficult. The representation proposed in this paper models the environment’s spatio-temporal dynamics by its frequency spectrum. The spectral representation of the time domain allows to identify, analyse and remember regularly occurring environment processes in a computationally efficient way. Knowledge of the periodicity of the different environment processes constitutes the model predictive capabilities, which are especially useful for long-term mobile robotics scenarios. In the experiments presented, the proposed approach is applied to data collected by a mobile robot patrolling an indoor environment over a period of one week. Three scenarios are investigated, including intruder detection and 4D mapping. The results indicate that the proposed method allows to represent arbitrary timescales with constant (and low) memory requirements, achieving compression rates up to 106 . Moreover, the representation allows for prediction of future environment’s state with ∼ 90% precision

Multiple Integrated Navigation Sensors for Improving Occupancy Grid FastSLAM

An autonomous vehicle must accurately observe its location within the environment to interact with objects and accomplish its mission. When its environment is unknown, the vehicle must construct a map detailing its surroundings while using it to maintain an accurate location. Such a vehicle is faced with the circularly defined Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem. However difficult, SLAM is a critical component of autonomous vehicle exploration with applications to search and rescue. To current knowledge, this research presents the first SLAM solution to integrate stereo cameras, inertial measurements, and vehicle odometry into a Multiple Integrated Navigation Sensor (MINS) path. The implementation combines the MINS path with LIDAR to observe and map the environment using the FastSLAM algorithm. In real-world tests, a mobile ground vehicle equipped with these sensors completed a 140 meter loop around indoor hallways. This SLAM solution produces a path that closes the loop and remains within 1 meter of truth, reducing the error 92% from an image-inertial navigation system and 79% from odometry FastSLAM

Path planning with pose SLAM

The probabilistic belief networks that result from standard feature-based simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) approaches cannot be directly used to plan trajectories. The reason is that they produce a sparse graph of landmark estimates and their probabilistic relations, which is of little value to find collision free paths for navigation. In contrast, we argue in this paper that Pose SLAM graphs can be directly used as belief roadmaps (BRMs). The original BRM algorithm assumes a known model of the environment from which probabilistic sampling generates a roadmap. In our work, the roadmap is built on-line by the Pose SLAM algorithm. The result is a hybrid BRM-Pose SLAM method that devises optimal navigation strategies on-line by searching for the path with lowest accumulated uncertainty for the robot pose. The method is validated over synthetic data and standard SLAM datasets.Postprint (published version

Tuberculosis in Malta in the 21st century

The World Health Organisation dedicated the 24th of March 1996 as World TB Day in a bid to promote its publicity campaign aimed at increasing awareness of the deteriorating situation as regards the treatment and control of tuberculosis. Today’s world population is about 5,700 million and TB is by far the major cause of death from infectious disease in persons over five years old. WHO estimates that one third of the world’s population, that is, about 1,900 million are already infected and we know that approximately 10% of these will develop the disease. The real concern, however, is that current drugs may become useless. Indeed, it is estimated that more than 50 million people are infected with drug-resistant strains. On a global scale, the main cause of drug resistance is poorly managed TB control programs.peer-reviewe

Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Manipulation Applications with Golem Krang

Implementing a simultaneous localization and mapping system and an image semantic segmentation method on a mobile manipulation. The application of the SLAM is working towards navigating among obstacles in unknown environments. The object detection method will be integrated for future manipulation tasks such as grasping. This work will be demonstrated on a real robotics hardware system in the lab.Outgoin