1,108 research outputs found
Bayesian Programming Multi-Target Tracking: an Automotive Application
A prerequisite to the design of future Advanced
Driver Assistance Systems for cars is a sensing system
providing all the information required for high-level driving
assistance tasks. In particular, target tracking is still
challenging in urban trafc situations, because of the large
number of rapidly maneuvering targets. The goal of this
paper is to present an original way to perform target position
and velocity, based on the occupancy grid framework. The
main interest of this method is to avoid the decision problem
of classical multi-target tracking algorithms. Obtained
occupancy grids are combined with danger estimation to
perform an elementary task of obstacle avoidance with an
electric car
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An evaluation framework for stereo-based driver assistance
This is the post-print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2012 Springer VerlagThe accuracy of stereo algorithms or optical flow methods is commonly assessed by comparing the results against the Middlebury
database. However, equivalent data for automotive or robotics applications
rarely exist as they are difficult to obtain. As our main contribution, we introduce an evaluation framework tailored for stereo-based driver assistance able to deliver excellent performance measures while
circumventing manual label effort. Within this framework one can combine several ways of ground-truthing, different comparison metrics, and use large image databases.
Using our framework we show examples on several types of ground truthing techniques: implicit ground truthing (e.g. sequence recorded without a crash occurred), robotic vehicles with high precision sensors, and to a small extent, manual labeling. To show the effectiveness of our evaluation framework we compare three different stereo algorithms on
pixel and object level. In more detail we evaluate an intermediate representation
called the Stixel World. Besides evaluating the accuracy of the Stixels, we investigate the completeness (equivalent to the detection rate) of the StixelWorld vs. the number of phantom Stixels. Among many findings, using this framework enables us to reduce the number of phantom Stixels by a factor of three compared to the base parametrization. This base parametrization has already been optimized by test driving vehicles for distances exceeding 10000 km
TractorEYE: Vision-based Real-time Detection for Autonomous Vehicles in Agriculture
Agricultural vehicles such as tractors and harvesters have for decades been able to navigate automatically and more efficiently using commercially available products such as auto-steering and tractor-guidance systems. However, a human operator is still required inside the vehicle to ensure the safety of vehicle and especially surroundings such as humans and animals. To get fully autonomous vehicles certified for farming, computer vision algorithms and sensor technologies must detect obstacles with equivalent or better than human-level performance. Furthermore, detections must run in real-time to allow vehicles to actuate and avoid collision.This thesis proposes a detection system (TractorEYE), a dataset (FieldSAFE), and procedures to fuse information from multiple sensor technologies to improve detection of obstacles and to generate a map. TractorEYE is a multi-sensor detection system for autonomous vehicles in agriculture. The multi-sensor system consists of three hardware synchronized and registered sensors (stereo camera, thermal camera and multi-beam lidar) mounted on/in a ruggedized and water-resistant casing. Algorithms have been developed to run a total of six detection algorithms (four for rgb camera, one for thermal camera and one for a Multi-beam lidar) and fuse detection information in a common format using either 3D positions or Inverse Sensor Models. A GPU powered computational platform is able to run detection algorithms online. For the rgb camera, a deep learning algorithm is proposed DeepAnomaly to perform real-time anomaly detection of distant, heavy occluded and unknown obstacles in agriculture. DeepAnomaly is -- compared to a state-of-the-art object detector Faster R-CNN -- for an agricultural use-case able to detect humans better and at longer ranges (45-90m) using a smaller memory footprint and 7.3-times faster processing. Low memory footprint and fast processing makes DeepAnomaly suitable for real-time applications running on an embedded GPU. FieldSAFE is a multi-modal dataset for detection of static and moving obstacles in agriculture. The dataset includes synchronized recordings from a rgb camera, stereo camera, thermal camera, 360-degree camera, lidar and radar. Precise localization and pose is provided using IMU and GPS. Ground truth of static and moving obstacles (humans, mannequin dolls, barrels, buildings, vehicles, and vegetation) are available as an annotated orthophoto and GPS coordinates for moving obstacles. Detection information from multiple detection algorithms and sensors are fused into a map using Inverse Sensor Models and occupancy grid maps. This thesis presented many scientific contribution and state-of-the-art within perception for autonomous tractors; this includes a dataset, sensor platform, detection algorithms and procedures to perform multi-sensor fusion. Furthermore, important engineering contributions to autonomous farming vehicles are presented such as easily applicable, open-source software packages and algorithms that have been demonstrated in an end-to-end real-time detection system. The contributions of this thesis have demonstrated, addressed and solved critical issues to utilize camera-based perception systems that are essential to make autonomous vehicles in agriculture a reality
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
Lidar-based Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles
Today, agricultural vehicles are available that can drive autonomously and follow exact route plans more precisely than human operators. Combined with advancements in precision agriculture, autonomous agricultural robots can reduce manual labor, improve workflow, and optimize yield. However, as of today, human operators are still required for monitoring the environment and acting upon potential obstacles in front of the vehicle. To eliminate this need, safety must be ensured by accurate and reliable obstacle detection and avoidance systems.In this thesis, lidar-based obstacle detection and recognition in agricultural environments has been investigated. A rotating multi-beam lidar generating 3D point clouds was used for point-wise classification of agricultural scenes, while multi-modal fusion with cameras and radar was used to increase performance and robustness. Two research perception platforms were presented and used for data acquisition. The proposed methods were all evaluated on recorded datasets that represented a wide range of realistic agricultural environments and included both static and dynamic obstacles.For 3D point cloud classification, two methods were proposed for handling density variations during feature extraction. One method outperformed a frequently used generic 3D feature descriptor, whereas the other method showed promising preliminary results using deep learning on 2D range images. For multi-modal fusion, four methods were proposed for combining lidar with color camera, thermal camera, and radar. Gradual improvements in classification accuracy were seen, as spatial, temporal, and multi-modal relationships were introduced in the models. Finally, occupancy grid mapping was used to fuse and map detections globally, and runtime obstacle detection was applied on mapped detections along the vehicle path, thus simulating an actual traversal.The proposed methods serve as a first step towards full autonomy for agricultural vehicles. The study has thus shown that recent advancements in autonomous driving can be transferred to the agricultural domain, when accurate distinctions are made between obstacles and processable vegetation. Future research in the domain has further been facilitated with the release of the multi-modal obstacle dataset, FieldSAFE
LXL: LiDAR Excluded Lean 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar and Camera Fusion
As an emerging technology and a relatively affordable device, the 4D imaging
radar has already been confirmed effective in performing 3D object detection in
autonomous driving. Nevertheless, the sparsity and noisiness of 4D radar point
clouds hinder further performance improvement, and in-depth studies about its
fusion with other modalities are lacking. On the other hand, most of the
camera-based perception methods transform the extracted image perspective view
features into the bird's-eye view geometrically via "depth-based splatting"
proposed in Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS), and some researchers exploit other modals
such as LiDARs or ordinary automotive radars for enhancement. Recently, a few
works have applied the "sampling" strategy for image view transformation,
showing that it outperforms "splatting" even without image depth prediction.
However, the potential of "sampling" is not fully unleashed. In this paper, we
investigate the "sampling" view transformation strategy on the camera and 4D
imaging radar fusion-based 3D object detection. In the proposed model, LXL,
predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids are
utilized to aid image view transformation, called "radar occupancy-assisted
depth-based sampling". Experiments on VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the
proposed method outperforms existing 3D object detection methods by a
significant margin without bells and whistles. Ablation studies demonstrate
that our method performs the best among different enhancement settings
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