5,767 research outputs found
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
Detection of Mines in Acoustic Images using Higher Order Spectral Features
A new pattern-recognition algorithm detects approximately 90% of the mines hidden in the Coastal Systems Station Sonar0, 1, and 3 databases of cluttered acoustic images, with about 10% false alarms. Similar to other approaches, the algorithm presented here includes processing the images with an adaptive Wiener filter (the degree of smoothing depends on the signal strength in a local neighborhood) to remove noise without destroying the structural information in the mine shapes, followed by a two-dimensional FIR filter designed to suppress noise and clutter, while enhancing the target signature. A double peak pattern is produced as the FIR filter passes over mine highlight and shadow regions. Although the location, size, and orientation of this pattern within a region of the image can vary, features derived from higher order spectra (HOS) are invariant to translation, rotation, and scaling, while capturing the spatial correlations of mine-like objects. Classification accuracy is improved by combining features based on geometrical properties of the filter output with features based on HOS. The highest accuracy is obtained by fusing classification based on bispectral features with classification based on trispectral features
Practical classification of different moving targets using automotive radar and deep neural networks
In this work, the authors present results for classification of different classes of targets (car, single and multiple people, bicycle) using automotive radar data and different neural networks. A fast implementation of radar algorithms for detection, tracking, and micro-Doppler extraction is proposed in conjunction with the automotive radar transceiver TEF810X and microcontroller unit SR32R274 manufactured by NXP Semiconductors. Three different types of neural networks are considered, namely a classic convolutional network, a residual network, and a combination of convolutional and recurrent network, for different classification problems across the four classes of targets recorded. Considerable accuracy (close to 100% in some cases) and low latency of the radar pre-processing prior to classification (âŒ0.55â
s to produce a 0.5â
s long spectrogram) are demonstrated in this study, and possible shortcomings and outstanding issues are discussed
Deployment characterization of a floatable tidal energy converter on a tidal channel, Ria Formosa, Portugal
This paper presents the results of a pilot experiment with an existing tidal energy converter (TEC),
Evopod 1 kW floatable prototype, in a real test case scenario (Faro Channel, Ria Formosa, Portugal). A
baseline marine geophysical, hydrodynamic and ecological study based on the experience collected on
the test site is presented. The collected data was used to validate a hydro-morphodynamic model,
allowing the selection of the installation area based on both operational and environmental constraints.
Operational results related to the description of power generation capacity, energy capture area and
proportion of energy flux are presented and discussed, including the failures occurring during the
experimental setup. The data is now available to the scientific community and to TEC industry developers,
enhancing the operational knowledge of TEC technology concerning efficiency, environmental
effects, and interactions (i.e. device/environment). The results can be used by developers on the licensing
process, on overcoming the commercial deployment barriers, on offering extra assurance and confidence
to investors, who traditionally have seen environmental concerns as a barrier, and on providing the
foundations whereupon similar deployment areas can be considered around the world for marine tidal
energy extraction.Acknowledgements
The paper is a contribution to the SCORE project, funded by the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT e PTDC/
AAG-TEC/1710/2014). Andre Pacheco was supported by the Portu-
guese Foundation for Science and Technology under the Portuguese
Researchers' Programme 2014 entitled âExploring new concepts for
extracting energy from tidesâ (IF/00286/2014/CP1234). Eduardo GGorbena has received funding for the OpTiCA project from the ~
Marie SkĆodowska-Curie Actions of the European Union's H2020-
MSCA-IF-EF-RI-2016/under REA grant agreement n [748747]. The
authors would like to thank to the Portuguese Maritime Authorities
and Sofareia SA for their help on the deployment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Spectral Embedding Norm: Looking Deep into the Spectrum of the Graph Laplacian
The extraction of clusters from a dataset which includes multiple clusters
and a significant background component is a non-trivial task of practical
importance. In image analysis this manifests for example in anomaly detection
and target detection. The traditional spectral clustering algorithm, which
relies on the leading eigenvectors to detect clusters, fails in such
cases. In this paper we propose the {\it spectral embedding norm} which sums
the squared values of the first normalized eigenvectors, where can be
significantly larger than . We prove that this quantity can be used to
separate clusters from the background in unbalanced settings, including extreme
cases such as outlier detection. The performance of the algorithm is not
sensitive to the choice of , and we demonstrate its application on synthetic
and real-world remote sensing and neuroimaging datasets
Efficient Computation in Adaptive Artificial Spiking Neural Networks
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are bio-inspired models of neural
computation that have proven highly effective. Still, ANNs lack a natural
notion of time, and neural units in ANNs exchange analog values in a
frame-based manner, a computationally and energetically inefficient form of
communication. This contrasts sharply with biological neurons that communicate
sparingly and efficiently using binary spikes. While artificial Spiking Neural
Networks (SNNs) can be constructed by replacing the units of an ANN with
spiking neurons, the current performance is far from that of deep ANNs on hard
benchmarks and these SNNs use much higher firing rates compared to their
biological counterparts, limiting their efficiency. Here we show how spiking
neurons that employ an efficient form of neural coding can be used to construct
SNNs that match high-performance ANNs and exceed state-of-the-art in SNNs on
important benchmarks, while requiring much lower average firing rates. For
this, we use spike-time coding based on the firing rate limiting adaptation
phenomenon observed in biological spiking neurons. This phenomenon can be
captured in adapting spiking neuron models, for which we derive the effective
transfer function. Neural units in ANNs trained with this transfer function can
be substituted directly with adaptive spiking neurons, and the resulting
Adaptive SNNs (AdSNNs) can carry out inference in deep neural networks using up
to an order of magnitude fewer spikes compared to previous SNNs. Adaptive
spike-time coding additionally allows for the dynamic control of neural coding
precision: we show how a simple model of arousal in AdSNNs further halves the
average required firing rate and this notion naturally extends to other forms
of attention. AdSNNs thus hold promise as a novel and efficient model for
neural computation that naturally fits to temporally continuous and
asynchronous applications
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