8,304 research outputs found
Deep Lidar CNN to Understand the Dynamics of Moving Vehicles
Perception technologies in Autonomous Driving are experiencing their golden
age due to the advances in Deep Learning. Yet, most of these systems rely on
the semantically rich information of RGB images. Deep Learning solutions
applied to the data of other sensors typically mounted on autonomous cars (e.g.
lidars or radars) are not explored much. In this paper we propose a novel
solution to understand the dynamics of moving vehicles of the scene from only
lidar information. The main challenge of this problem stems from the fact that
we need to disambiguate the proprio-motion of the 'observer' vehicle from that
of the external 'observed' vehicles. For this purpose, we devise a CNN
architecture which at testing time is fed with pairs of consecutive lidar
scans. However, in order to properly learn the parameters of this network,
during training we introduce a series of so-called pretext tasks which also
leverage on image data. These tasks include semantic information about
vehicleness and a novel lidar-flow feature which combines standard image-based
optical flow with lidar scans. We obtain very promising results and show that
including distilled image information only during training, allows improving
the inference results of the network at test time, even when image data is no
longer used.Comment: Presented in IEEE ICRA 2018. IEEE Copyrights: Personal use of this
material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other
uses. (V2 just corrected comments on arxiv submission
Approximate Bayesian Image Interpretation using Generative Probabilistic Graphics Programs
The idea of computer vision as the Bayesian inverse problem to computer
graphics has a long history and an appealing elegance, but it has proved
difficult to directly implement. Instead, most vision tasks are approached via
complex bottom-up processing pipelines. Here we show that it is possible to
write short, simple probabilistic graphics programs that define flexible
generative models and to automatically invert them to interpret real-world
images. Generative probabilistic graphics programs consist of a stochastic
scene generator, a renderer based on graphics software, a stochastic likelihood
model linking the renderer's output and the data, and latent variables that
adjust the fidelity of the renderer and the tolerance of the likelihood model.
Representations and algorithms from computer graphics, originally designed to
produce high-quality images, are instead used as the deterministic backbone for
highly approximate and stochastic generative models. This formulation combines
probabilistic programming, computer graphics, and approximate Bayesian
computation, and depends only on general-purpose, automatic inference
techniques. We describe two applications: reading sequences of degraded and
adversarially obscured alphanumeric characters, and inferring 3D road models
from vehicle-mounted camera images. Each of the probabilistic graphics programs
we present relies on under 20 lines of probabilistic code, and supports
accurate, approximately Bayesian inferences about ambiguous real-world images.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this wor
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