Enhancing Navigation Benchmarking and Perception Data Generation for Row-based Crops in Simulation

Service robotics is recently enhancing precision agriculture enabling many automated processes based on efficient autonomous navigation solutions. However, data generation and infield validation campaigns hinder the progress of large-scale autonomous platforms. Simulated environments and deep visual perception are spreading as successful tools to speed up the development of robust navigation with low-cost RGB-D cameras. In this context, the contribution of this work is twofold: a synthetic dataset to train deep semantic segmentation networks together with a collection of virtual scenarios for a fast evaluation of navigation algorithms. Moreover, an automatic parametric approach is developed to explore different field geometries and features. The simulation framework and the dataset have been evaluated by training a deep segmentation network on different crops and benchmarking the resulting navigation.Comment: Accepted at the 14th European Conference on Precision Agriculture (ECPA) 202

Discriminative Training of Deep Fully-connected Continuous CRF with Task-specific Loss

Recent works on deep conditional random fields (CRF) have set new records on many vision tasks involving structured predictions. Here we propose a fully-connected deep continuous CRF model for both discrete and continuous labelling problems. We exemplify the usefulness of the proposed model on multi-class semantic labelling (discrete) and the robust depth estimation (continuous) problems. In our framework, we model both the unary and the pairwise potential functions as deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), which are jointly learned in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed method possesses the main advantage of continuously-valued CRF, which is a closed-form solution for the Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference. To better adapt to different tasks, instead of using the commonly employed maximum likelihood CRF parameter learning protocol, we propose task-specific loss functions for learning the CRF parameters. It enables direct optimization of the quality of the MAP estimates during the course of learning. Specifically, we optimize the multi-class classification loss for the semantic labelling task and the Turkey's biweight loss for the robust depth estimation problem. Experimental results on the semantic labelling and robust depth estimation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method compare favorably against both baseline and state-of-the-art methods. In particular, we show that although the proposed deep CRF model is continuously valued, with the equipment of task-specific loss, it achieves impressive results even on discrete labelling tasks

Fused Text Segmentation Networks for Multi-oriented Scene Text Detection

In this paper, we introduce a novel end-end framework for multi-oriented scene text detection from an instance-aware semantic segmentation perspective. We present Fused Text Segmentation Networks, which combine multi-level features during the feature extracting as text instance may rely on finer feature expression compared to general objects. It detects and segments the text instance jointly and simultaneously, leveraging merits from both semantic segmentation task and region proposal based object detection task. Not involving any extra pipelines, our approach surpasses the current state of the art on multi-oriented scene text detection benchmarks: ICDAR2015 Incidental Scene Text and MSRA-TD500 reaching Hmean 84.1% and 82.0% respectively. Morever, we report a baseline on total-text containing curved text which suggests effectiveness of the proposed approach.Comment: Accepted by ICPR201

SegICP: Integrated Deep Semantic Segmentation and Pose Estimation

Recent robotic manipulation competitions have highlighted that sophisticated robots still struggle to achieve fast and reliable perception of task-relevant objects in complex, realistic scenarios. To improve these systems' perceptive speed and robustness, we present SegICP, a novel integrated solution to object recognition and pose estimation. SegICP couples convolutional neural networks and multi-hypothesis point cloud registration to achieve both robust pixel-wise semantic segmentation as well as accurate and real-time 6-DOF pose estimation for relevant objects. Our architecture achieves 1cm position error and <5^\circ$ angle error in real time without an initial seed. We evaluate and benchmark SegICP against an annotated dataset generated by motion capture.Comment: IROS camera-read