47,841 research outputs found
Towards Visual Ego-motion Learning in Robots
Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the
past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying
motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform
these tasks, in a minimally supervised setting, as they gain more experience.
To this end, we propose a fully trainable solution to visual ego-motion
estimation for varied camera optics. We propose a visual ego-motion learning
architecture that maps observed optical flow vectors to an ego-motion density
estimate via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). By modeling the architecture as a
Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE), our model is able to provide
introspective reasoning and prediction for ego-motion induced scene-flow.
Additionally, our proposed model is especially amenable to bootstrapped
ego-motion learning in robots where the supervision in ego-motion estimation
for a particular camera sensor can be obtained from standard navigation-based
sensor fusion strategies (GPS/INS and wheel-odometry fusion). Through
experiments, we show the utility of our proposed approach in enabling the
concept of self-supervised learning for visual ego-motion estimation in
autonomous robots.Comment: Conference paper; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2017, Vancouver CA; 8 pages, 8 figures,
2 table
Vision-based Real-Time Aerial Object Localization and Tracking for UAV Sensing System
The paper focuses on the problem of vision-based obstacle detection and
tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. A real-time object
localization and tracking strategy from monocular image sequences is developed
by effectively integrating the object detection and tracking into a dynamic
Kalman model. At the detection stage, the object of interest is automatically
detected and localized from a saliency map computed via the image background
connectivity cue at each frame; at the tracking stage, a Kalman filter is
employed to provide a coarse prediction of the object state, which is further
refined via a local detector incorporating the saliency map and the temporal
information between two consecutive frames. Compared to existing methods, the
proposed approach does not require any manual initialization for tracking, runs
much faster than the state-of-the-art trackers of its kind, and achieves
competitive tracking performance on a large number of image sequences.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of
the proposed approach.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
Digging Deeper into Egocentric Gaze Prediction
This paper digs deeper into factors that influence egocentric gaze. Instead
of training deep models for this purpose in a blind manner, we propose to
inspect factors that contribute to gaze guidance during daily tasks. Bottom-up
saliency and optical flow are assessed versus strong spatial prior baselines.
Task-specific cues such as vanishing point, manipulation point, and hand
regions are analyzed as representatives of top-down information. We also look
into the contribution of these factors by investigating a simple recurrent
neural model for ego-centric gaze prediction. First, deep features are
extracted for all input video frames. Then, a gated recurrent unit is employed
to integrate information over time and to predict the next fixation. We also
propose an integrated model that combines the recurrent model with several
top-down and bottom-up cues. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets
reveal that (1) spatial biases are strong in egocentric videos, (2) bottom-up
saliency models perform poorly in predicting gaze and underperform spatial
biases, (3) deep features perform better compared to traditional features, (4)
as opposed to hand regions, the manipulation point is a strong influential cue
for gaze prediction, (5) combining the proposed recurrent model with bottom-up
cues, vanishing points and, in particular, manipulation point results in the
best gaze prediction accuracy over egocentric videos, (6) the knowledge
transfer works best for cases where the tasks or sequences are similar, and (7)
task and activity recognition can benefit from gaze prediction. Our findings
suggest that (1) there should be more emphasis on hand-object interaction and
(2) the egocentric vision community should consider larger datasets including
diverse stimuli and more subjects.Comment: presented at WACV 201
How is Gaze Influenced by Image Transformations? Dataset and Model
Data size is the bottleneck for developing deep saliency models, because
collecting eye-movement data is very time consuming and expensive. Most of
current studies on human attention and saliency modeling have used high quality
stereotype stimuli. In real world, however, captured images undergo various
types of transformations. Can we use these transformations to augment existing
saliency datasets? Here, we first create a novel saliency dataset including
fixations of 10 observers over 1900 images degraded by 19 types of
transformations. Second, by analyzing eye movements, we find that observers
look at different locations over transformed versus original images. Third, we
utilize the new data over transformed images, called data augmentation
transformation (DAT), to train deep saliency models. We find that label
preserving DATs with negligible impact on human gaze boost saliency prediction,
whereas some other DATs that severely impact human gaze degrade the
performance. These label preserving valid augmentation transformations provide
a solution to enlarge existing saliency datasets. Finally, we introduce a novel
saliency model based on generative adversarial network (dubbed GazeGAN). A
modified UNet is proposed as the generator of the GazeGAN, which combines
classic skip connections with a novel center-surround connection (CSC), in
order to leverage multi level features. We also propose a histogram loss based
on Alternative Chi Square Distance (ACS HistLoss) to refine the saliency map in
terms of luminance distribution. Extensive experiments and comparisons over 3
datasets indicate that GazeGAN achieves the best performance in terms of
popular saliency evaluation metrics, and is more robust to various
perturbations. Our code and data are available at:
https://github.com/CZHQuality/Sal-CFS-GAN
Visual motion processing and human tracking behavior
The accurate visual tracking of a moving object is a human fundamental skill
that allows to reduce the relative slip and instability of the object's image
on the retina, thus granting a stable, high-quality vision. In order to
optimize tracking performance across time, a quick estimate of the object's
global motion properties needs to be fed to the oculomotor system and
dynamically updated. Concurrently, performance can be greatly improved in terms
of latency and accuracy by taking into account predictive cues, especially
under variable conditions of visibility and in presence of ambiguous retinal
information. Here, we review several recent studies focusing on the integration
of retinal and extra-retinal information for the control of human smooth
pursuit.By dynamically probing the tracking performance with well established
paradigms in the visual perception and oculomotor literature we provide the
basis to test theoretical hypotheses within the framework of dynamic
probabilistic inference. We will in particular present the applications of
these results in light of state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms
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