Switching GAN-based Image Filters to Improve Perception for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving holds the potential to increase human productivity, reduce accidents caused by human errors, allow better utilization of roads, reduce traffic accidents and congestion, free up parking space and provide many other advantages. Perception of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) refers to the use of sensors to perceive the world, e.g. using cameras to detect and classify objects. Traffic scene understanding is a key research problem in perception in autonomous driving, and semantic segmentation is a useful method to address this problem. Adverse weather conditions are a reality that AV must contend with. Conditions like rain, snow, haze, etc. can drastically reduce visibility and thus affect computer vision models. Models for perception for AVs are currently designed for and tested on predominantly ideal weather conditions under good illumination. The most complete solution may be to have the segmentation networks be trained on all possible adverse conditions. Thus a dataset to train a segmentation network to make it robust to rain would need to have adequate data that cover these conditions well. Moreover, labeling is an expensive task. It is particularly expensive for semantic segmentation, as each object in a scene needs to be identified and each pixel annotated in the right class. Thus, the adverse weather is a challenging problem for perception models in AVs. This thesis explores the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) in order to improve semantic segmentation. We design a framework and a methodology to evaluate the proposed approach. The framework consists of an Adversity Detector, and a series of denoising filters. The Adversity Detector is an image classifier that takes as input clear weather or adverse weather scenes, and attempts to predict whether the given image contains rain, or puddles, or other conditions that can adversely affect semantic segmentation. The filters are denoising generative adversarial networks that are trained to remove the adverse conditions from images in order to translate the image to a domain the segmentation network has been trained on, i.e. clear weather images. We use the prediction from the Adversity Detector to choose which GAN filter to use. The methodology we devise for evaluating our approach uses the trained filters to output sets of images that we can then run segmentation tasks on. This, we argue, is a better metric for evaluating the GANs than similarity measures such as SSIM. We also use synthetic data so we can perform systematic evaluation of our technique. We train two kinds of GANs, one that uses paired data (CycleGAN), and one that does not (Pix2Pix). We have concluded that GAN architectures that use unpaired data are not sufficiently good models for denoising. We train the denoising filters using the other architecture and we found them easy to train, and they show good results. While these filters do not show better performance than when we train our segmentation network with adverse weather data, we refer back to the point that training the segmentation network requires labelled data which is expensive to collect and annotate, particularly for adverse weather and lighting conditions. We implement our proposed framework and report a 17\% increase in performance in segmentation over the baseline results obtained when we do not use our framework

NASA Tech Briefs, April 1993

Topics include: Optoelectronics; Electronic Components and Circuits; Electronic Systems; Physical Sciences; Materials; Computer Programs; Mechanics; Machinery; Fabrication Technology; Mathematics and Information Sciences; Life Sciences

Feature Papers of Drones - Volume II

[EN] The present book is divided into two volumes (Volume I: articles 1–23, and Volume II: articles 24–54) which compile the articles and communications submitted to the Topical Collection ”Feature Papers of Drones” during the years 2020 to 2022 describing novel or new cutting-edge designs, developments, and/or applications of unmanned vehicles (drones). Articles 24–41 are focused on drone applications, but emphasize two types: firstly, those related to agriculture and forestry (articles 24–35) where the number of applications of drones dominates all other possible applications. These articles review the latest research and future directions for precision agriculture, vegetation monitoring, change monitoring, forestry management, and forest fires. Secondly, articles 36–41 addresses the water and marine application of drones for ecological and conservation-related applications with emphasis on the monitoring of water resources and habitat monitoring. Finally, articles 42–54 looks at just a few of the huge variety of potential applications of civil drones from different points of view, including the following: the social acceptance of drone operations in urban areas or their influential factors; 3D reconstruction applications; sensor technologies to either improve the performance of existing applications or to open up new working areas; and machine and deep learning development

UAVs for the Environmental Sciences

This book gives an overview of the usage of UAVs in environmental sciences covering technical basics, data acquisition with different sensors, data processing schemes and illustrating various examples of application

Systematic Approaches for Telemedicine and Data Coordination for COVID-19 in Baja California, Mexico

Conference proceedings info: ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologies Raleigh, HI, United States, March 24-26, 2023 Pages 529-542We provide a model for systematic implementation of telemedicine within a large evaluation center for COVID-19 in the area of Baja California, Mexico. Our model is based on human-centric design factors and cross disciplinary collaborations for scalable data-driven enablement of smartphone, cellular, and video Teleconsul-tation technologies to link hospitals, clinics, and emergency medical services for point-of-care assessments of COVID testing, and for subsequent treatment and quar-antine decisions. A multidisciplinary team was rapidly created, in cooperation with different institutions, including: the Autonomous University of Baja California, the Ministry of Health, the Command, Communication and Computer Control Center of the Ministry of the State of Baja California (C4), Colleges of Medicine, and the College of Psychologists. Our objective is to provide information to the public and to evaluate COVID-19 in real time and to track, regional, municipal, and state-wide data in real time that informs supply chains and resource allocation with the anticipation of a surge in COVID-19 cases. RESUMEN Proporcionamos un modelo para la implementación sistemática de la telemedicina dentro de un gran centro de evaluación de COVID-19 en el área de Baja California, México. Nuestro modelo se basa en factores de diseño centrados en el ser humano y colaboraciones interdisciplinarias para la habilitación escalable basada en datos de tecnologías de teleconsulta de teléfonos inteligentes, celulares y video para vincular hospitales, clínicas y servicios médicos de emergencia para evaluaciones de COVID en el punto de atención. pruebas, y para el tratamiento posterior y decisiones de cuarentena. Rápidamente se creó un equipo multidisciplinario, en cooperación con diferentes instituciones, entre ellas: la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, la Secretaría de Salud, el Centro de Comando, Comunicaciones y Control Informático. de la Secretaría del Estado de Baja California (C4), Facultades de Medicina y Colegio de Psicólogos. Nuestro objetivo es proporcionar información al público y evaluar COVID-19 en tiempo real y rastrear datos regionales, municipales y estatales en tiempo real que informan las cadenas de suministro y la asignación de recursos con la anticipación de un aumento de COVID-19. 19 casos.ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3236-