16,253 research outputs found
ClusterNet: Detecting Small Objects in Large Scenes by Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Information
Object detection in wide area motion imagery (WAMI) has drawn the attention
of the computer vision research community for a number of years. WAMI proposes
a number of unique challenges including extremely small object sizes, both
sparse and densely-packed objects, and extremely large search spaces (large
video frames). Nearly all state-of-the-art methods in WAMI object detection
report that appearance-based classifiers fail in this challenging data and
instead rely almost entirely on motion information in the form of background
subtraction or frame-differencing. In this work, we experimentally verify the
failure of appearance-based classifiers in WAMI, such as Faster R-CNN and a
heatmap-based fully convolutional neural network (CNN), and propose a novel
two-stage spatio-temporal CNN which effectively and efficiently combines both
appearance and motion information to significantly surpass the state-of-the-art
in WAMI object detection. To reduce the large search space, the first stage
(ClusterNet) takes in a set of extremely large video frames, combines the
motion and appearance information within the convolutional architecture, and
proposes regions of objects of interest (ROOBI). These ROOBI can contain from
one to clusters of several hundred objects due to the large video frame size
and varying object density in WAMI. The second stage (FoveaNet) then estimates
the centroid location of all objects in that given ROOBI simultaneously via
heatmap estimation. The proposed method exceeds state-of-the-art results on the
WPAFB 2009 dataset by 5-16% for moving objects and nearly 50% for stopped
objects, as well as being the first proposed method in wide area motion imagery
to detect completely stationary objects.Comment: Main paper is 8 pages. Supplemental section contains a walk-through
of our method (using a qualitative example) and qualitative results for WPAFB
2009 datase
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-
Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching
This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of
grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered
environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range
of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel
objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance
prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping
primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain
image classification framework that matches observed images to product images.
Since product images are readily available for a wide range of objects (e.g.,
from the web), the system works out-of-the-box for novel objects without
requiring any additional training data. Exhaustive experimental results
demonstrate that our multi-affordance grasping achieves high success rates for
a wide variety of objects in clutter, and our recognition algorithm achieves
high accuracy for both known and novel grasped objects. The approach was part
of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 1st place in the stowing task at the
2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. All code, datasets, and pre-trained models are
available online at http://arc.cs.princeton.eduComment: Project webpage: http://arc.cs.princeton.edu Summary video:
https://youtu.be/6fG7zwGfIk
Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?
Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally
regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution
to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the
rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of
these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the
performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain
removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic
rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on
real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In
this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new
dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad
variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We
propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on
their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance
segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If
successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve
segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked
features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal
algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed
dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and
showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the
best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy
by 7.72%.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System
Convolutional neural network architecture for geometric matching
We address the problem of determining correspondences between two images in
agreement with a geometric model such as an affine or thin-plate spline
transformation, and estimating its parameters. The contributions of this work
are three-fold. First, we propose a convolutional neural network architecture
for geometric matching. The architecture is based on three main components that
mimic the standard steps of feature extraction, matching and simultaneous
inlier detection and model parameter estimation, while being trainable
end-to-end. Second, we demonstrate that the network parameters can be trained
from synthetically generated imagery without the need for manual annotation and
that our matching layer significantly increases generalization capabilities to
never seen before images. Finally, we show that the same model can perform both
instance-level and category-level matching giving state-of-the-art results on
the challenging Proposal Flow dataset.Comment: In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
(CVPR 2017
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