4,489 research outputs found
PiCANet: Learning Pixel-wise Contextual Attention for Saliency Detection
Contexts play an important role in the saliency detection task. However,
given a context region, not all contextual information is helpful for the final
task. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention
network, i.e., the PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative
context locations for each pixel. Specifically, for each pixel, it can generate
an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to the contextual
relevance at each context location. An attended contextual feature can then be
constructed by selectively aggregating the contextual information. We formulate
the proposed PiCANet in both global and local forms to attend to global and
local contexts, respectively. Both models are fully differentiable and can be
embedded into CNNs for joint training. We also incorporate the proposed models
with the U-Net architecture to detect salient objects. Extensive experiments
show that the proposed PiCANets can consistently improve saliency detection
performance. The global and local PiCANets facilitate learning global contrast
and homogeneousness, respectively. As a result, our saliency model can detect
salient objects more accurately and uniformly, thus performing favorably
against the state-of-the-art methods
User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home
In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments
Object Detection based on Region Decomposition and Assembly
Region-based object detection infers object regions for one or more
categories in an image. Due to the recent advances in deep learning and region
proposal methods, object detectors based on convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) have been flourishing and provided the promising detection results.
However, the detection accuracy is degraded often because of the low
discriminability of object CNN features caused by occlusions and inaccurate
region proposals. In this paper, we therefore propose a region decomposition
and assembly detector (R-DAD) for more accurate object detection.
In the proposed R-DAD, we first decompose an object region into multiple
small regions. To capture an entire appearance and part details of the object
jointly, we extract CNN features within the whole object region and decomposed
regions. We then learn the semantic relations between the object and its parts
by combining the multi-region features stage by stage with region assembly
blocks, and use the combined and high-level semantic features for the object
classification and localization. In addition, for more accurate region
proposals, we propose a multi-scale proposal layer that can generate object
proposals of various scales. We integrate the R-DAD into several feature
extractors, and prove the distinct performance improvement on PASCAL07/12 and
MSCOCO18 compared to the recent convolutional detectors.Comment: Accepted to 2019 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI
Social Bots as Initiators of Human Interaction in Enterprise Social Networks
Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) are said to have the potential to significantly improve communication and collaboration between employees. However, utilization is still a problem in organizations, as participation is voluntary. Current research on Affordance theory in IS research suggests one reason being that users may not always recognize the opportunities for action and the potential outcome of the corresponding actualization. In our qualitative study in a medium-sized company, we investigate how experiencing offline networking with other ESN users will help to recognize online networking potentials, leading to an increased actualization of ESN affordances. In addition, we investigate the role of social bots (here: Lunch Roulette Bot), which provoke interaction by inviting users to meet other employees for lunch, therefore nudging users to experience certain actualizations like offline networking. We find that social bots can be more helpful than conventional one-to-many solicitations of the management and increase human interaction in ESN
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