6,996 research outputs found
Learning to Fly by Crashing
How do you learn to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and avoid
obstacles? One approach is to use a small dataset collected by human experts:
however, high capacity learning algorithms tend to overfit when trained with
little data. An alternative is to use simulation. But the gap between
simulation and real world remains large especially for perception problems. The
reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes!
In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes
itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects: it
samples naive trajectories and crashes into random objects. We crash our drone
11,500 times to create one of the biggest UAV crash dataset. This dataset
captures the different ways in which a UAV can crash. We use all this negative
flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same
trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. We show
that this simple self-supervised model is quite effective in navigating the UAV
even in extremely cluttered environments with dynamic obstacles including
humans. For supplementary video see: https://youtu.be/u151hJaGKU
Closed-loop Bayesian Semantic Data Fusion for Collaborative Human-Autonomy Target Search
In search applications, autonomous unmanned vehicles must be able to
efficiently reacquire and localize mobile targets that can remain out of view
for long periods of time in large spaces. As such, all available information
sources must be actively leveraged -- including imprecise but readily available
semantic observations provided by humans. To achieve this, this work develops
and validates a novel collaborative human-machine sensing solution for dynamic
target search. Our approach uses continuous partially observable Markov
decision process (CPOMDP) planning to generate vehicle trajectories that
optimally exploit imperfect detection data from onboard sensors, as well as
semantic natural language observations that can be specifically requested from
human sensors. The key innovation is a scalable hierarchical Gaussian mixture
model formulation for efficiently solving CPOMDPs with semantic observations in
continuous dynamic state spaces. The approach is demonstrated and validated
with a real human-robot team engaged in dynamic indoor target search and
capture scenarios on a custom testbed.Comment: Final version accepted and submitted to 2018 FUSION Conference
(Cambridge, UK, July 2018
Plane-Based Optimization of Geometry and Texture for RGB-D Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes
We present a novel approach to reconstruct RGB-D indoor scene with plane
primitives. Our approach takes as input a RGB-D sequence and a dense coarse
mesh reconstructed by some 3D reconstruction method on the sequence, and
generate a lightweight, low-polygonal mesh with clear face textures and sharp
features without losing geometry details from the original scene. To achieve
this, we firstly partition the input mesh with plane primitives, simplify it
into a lightweight mesh next, then optimize plane parameters, camera poses and
texture colors to maximize the photometric consistency across frames, and
finally optimize mesh geometry to maximize consistency between geometry and
planes. Compared to existing planar reconstruction methods which only cover
large planar regions in the scene, our method builds the entire scene by
adaptive planes without losing geometry details and preserves sharp features in
the final mesh. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it
onto several RGB-D scans and comparing it to other state-of-the-art
reconstruction methods.Comment: in International Conference on 3D Vision 2018; Models and Code: see
https://github.com/chaowang15/plane-opt-rgbd. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:1905.0885
Egocentric Hand Detection Via Dynamic Region Growing
Egocentric videos, which mainly record the activities carried out by the
users of the wearable cameras, have drawn much research attentions in recent
years. Due to its lengthy content, a large number of ego-related applications
have been developed to abstract the captured videos. As the users are
accustomed to interacting with the target objects using their own hands while
their hands usually appear within their visual fields during the interaction,
an egocentric hand detection step is involved in tasks like gesture
recognition, action recognition and social interaction understanding. In this
work, we propose a dynamic region growing approach for hand region detection in
egocentric videos, by jointly considering hand-related motion and egocentric
cues. We first determine seed regions that most likely belong to the hand, by
analyzing the motion patterns across successive frames. The hand regions can
then be located by extending from the seed regions, according to the scores
computed for the adjacent superpixels. These scores are derived from four
egocentric cues: contrast, location, position consistency and appearance
continuity. We discuss how to apply the proposed method in real-life scenarios,
where multiple hands irregularly appear and disappear from the videos.
Experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed method achieves
superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, especially in
complicated scenarios
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