10,719 research outputs found
Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives
The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have
within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also
well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would
ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive
behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing
real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often
prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention
and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of this paper is
two-fold: first, we show that the Efficient Large-scale Stereo Matching
algorithm (ELAS) by A. Geiger et al. 2010 for computation of the disparity map
is well suited to be used on a humanoid robotic platform as the iCub robot;
second, we show how, provided with a fast and reliable stereo system,
implementing relatively challenging visual behaviors in natural settings can
require much less effort. As a case of study we consider the common situation
where the robot is asked to focus the attention on one object close in the
scene, showing how a simple but effective disparity-based segmentation solves
the problem in this case. Indeed this example paves the way to a variety of
other similar applications
Deep Affordance-grounded Sensorimotor Object Recognition
It is well-established by cognitive neuroscience that human perception of
objects constitutes a complex process, where object appearance information is
combined with evidence about the so-called object "affordances", namely the
types of actions that humans typically perform when interacting with them. This
fact has recently motivated the "sensorimotor" approach to the challenging task
of automatic object recognition, where both information sources are fused to
improve robustness. In this work, the aforementioned paradigm is adopted,
surpassing current limitations of sensorimotor object recognition research.
Specifically, the deep learning paradigm is introduced to the problem for the
first time, developing a number of novel neuro-biologically and
neuro-physiologically inspired architectures that utilize state-of-the-art
neural networks for fusing the available information sources in multiple ways.
The proposed methods are evaluated using a large RGB-D corpus, which is
specifically collected for the task of sensorimotor object recognition and is
made publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of
affordance information to object recognition, achieving an up to 29% relative
error reduction by its inclusion.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, dataset link included, accepted to CVPR 201
Lifelong Neural Predictive Coding: Learning Cumulatively Online without Forgetting
In lifelong learning systems, especially those based on artificial neural
networks, one of the biggest obstacles is the severe inability to retain old
knowledge as new information is encountered. This phenomenon is known as
catastrophic forgetting. In this article, we propose a new kind of
connectionist architecture, the Sequential Neural Coding Network, that is
robust to forgetting when learning from streams of data points and, unlike
networks of today, does not learn via the immensely popular back-propagation of
errors. Grounded in the neurocognitive theory of predictive processing, our
model adapts its synapses in a biologically-plausible fashion, while another,
complementary neural system rapidly learns to direct and control this
cortex-like structure by mimicking the task-executive control functionality of
the basal ganglia. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our self-organizing
system experiences significantly less forgetting as compared to standard neural
models and outperforms a wide swath of previously proposed methods even though
it is trained across task datasets in a stream-like fashion. The promising
performance of our complementary system on benchmarks, e.g., SplitMNIST, Split
Fashion MNIST, and Split NotMNIST, offers evidence that by incorporating
mechanisms prominent in real neuronal systems, such as competition, sparse
activation patterns, and iterative input processing, a new possibility for
tackling the grand challenge of lifelong machine learning opens up.Comment: Key updates including results on standard benchmarks, e.g., split
mnist/fmnist/not-mnist. Task selection/basal ganglia model has been
integrate
Unsupervised Learning of Individuals and Categories from Images
Motivated by the existence of highly selective, sparsely firing cells observed in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL), we present an unsupervised method for learning and recognizing object categories from unlabeled images. In our model, a network of nonlinear neurons learns a sparse representation of its inputs through an unsupervised expectation-maximization process. We show that the application of this strategy to an invariant feature-based description of natural images leads to the development of units displaying sparse, invariant selectivity for particular individuals or image categories much like those observed in the MTL data
The Neural Particle Filter
The robust estimation of dynamically changing features, such as the position
of prey, is one of the hallmarks of perception. On an abstract, algorithmic
level, nonlinear Bayesian filtering, i.e. the estimation of temporally changing
signals based on the history of observations, provides a mathematical framework
for dynamic perception in real time. Since the general, nonlinear filtering
problem is analytically intractable, particle filters are considered among the
most powerful approaches to approximating the solution numerically. Yet, these
algorithms prevalently rely on importance weights, and thus it remains an
unresolved question how the brain could implement such an inference strategy
with a neuronal population. Here, we propose the Neural Particle Filter (NPF),
a weight-less particle filter that can be interpreted as the neuronal dynamics
of a recurrently connected neural network that receives feed-forward input from
sensory neurons and represents the posterior probability distribution in terms
of samples. Specifically, this algorithm bridges the gap between the
computational task of online state estimation and an implementation that allows
networks of neurons in the brain to perform nonlinear Bayesian filtering. The
model captures not only the properties of temporal and multisensory integration
according to Bayesian statistics, but also allows online learning with a
maximum likelihood approach. With an example from multisensory integration, we
demonstrate that the numerical performance of the model is adequate to account
for both filtering and identification problems. Due to the weightless approach,
our algorithm alleviates the 'curse of dimensionality' and thus outperforms
conventional, weighted particle filters in higher dimensions for a limited
number of particles
A Taxonomy of Deep Convolutional Neural Nets for Computer Vision
Traditional architectures for solving computer vision problems and the degree
of success they enjoyed have been heavily reliant on hand-crafted features.
However, of late, deep learning techniques have offered a compelling
alternative -- that of automatically learning problem-specific features. With
this new paradigm, every problem in computer vision is now being re-examined
from a deep learning perspective. Therefore, it has become important to
understand what kind of deep networks are suitable for a given problem.
Although general surveys of this fast-moving paradigm (i.e. deep-networks)
exist, a survey specific to computer vision is missing. We specifically
consider one form of deep networks widely used in computer vision -
convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We start with "AlexNet" as our base CNN
and then examine the broad variations proposed over time to suit different
applications. We hope that our recipe-style survey will serve as a guide,
particularly for novice practitioners intending to use deep-learning techniques
for computer vision.Comment: Published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (http://goo.gl/6691Bm
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