1,673 research outputs found
PPF - A Parallel Particle Filtering Library
We present the parallel particle filtering (PPF) software library, which
enables hybrid shared-memory/distributed-memory parallelization of particle
filtering (PF) algorithms combining the Message Passing Interface (MPI) with
multithreading for multi-level parallelism. The library is implemented in Java
and relies on OpenMPI's Java bindings for inter-process communication. It
includes dynamic load balancing, multi-thread balancing, and several
algorithmic improvements for PF, such as input-space domain decomposition. The
PPF library hides the difficulties of efficient parallel programming of PF
algorithms and provides application developers with the necessary tools for
parallel implementation of PF methods. We demonstrate the capabilities of the
PPF library using two distributed PF algorithms in two scenarios with different
numbers of particles. The PPF library runs a 38 million particle problem,
corresponding to more than 1.86 GB of particle data, on 192 cores with 67%
parallel efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, the PPF library is the first
open-source software that offers a parallel framework for PF applications.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures; will appear in the proceedings of the IET Data
Fusion & Target Tracking Conference 201
Attention and Anticipation in Fast Visual-Inertial Navigation
We study a Visual-Inertial Navigation (VIN) problem in which a robot needs to
estimate its state using an on-board camera and an inertial sensor, without any
prior knowledge of the external environment. We consider the case in which the
robot can allocate limited resources to VIN, due to tight computational
constraints. Therefore, we answer the following question: under limited
resources, what are the most relevant visual cues to maximize the performance
of visual-inertial navigation? Our approach has four key ingredients. First, it
is task-driven, in that the selection of the visual cues is guided by a metric
quantifying the VIN performance. Second, it exploits the notion of
anticipation, since it uses a simplified model for forward-simulation of robot
dynamics, predicting the utility of a set of visual cues over a future time
horizon. Third, it is efficient and easy to implement, since it leads to a
greedy algorithm for the selection of the most relevant visual cues. Fourth, it
provides formal performance guarantees: we leverage submodularity to prove that
the greedy selection cannot be far from the optimal (combinatorial) selection.
Simulations and real experiments on agile drones show that our approach ensures
state-of-the-art VIN performance while maintaining a lean processing time. In
the easy scenarios, our approach outperforms appearance-based feature selection
in terms of localization errors. In the most challenging scenarios, it enables
accurate visual-inertial navigation while appearance-based feature selection
fails to track robot's motion during aggressive maneuvers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
Semi-Sparsity for Smoothing Filters
In this paper, we propose an interesting semi-sparsity smoothing algorithm
based on a novel sparsity-inducing optimization framework. This method is
derived from the multiple observations, that is, semi-sparsity prior knowledge
is more universally applicable, especially in areas where sparsity is not fully
admitted, such as polynomial-smoothing surfaces. We illustrate that this
semi-sparsity can be identified into a generalized -norm minimization in
higher-order gradient domains, thereby giving rise to a new "feature-aware"
filtering method with a powerful simultaneous-fitting ability in both sparse
features (singularities and sharpening edges) and non-sparse regions
(polynomial-smoothing surfaces). Notice that a direct solver is always
unavailable due to the non-convexity and combinatorial nature of -norm
minimization. Instead, we solve the model based on an efficient half-quadratic
splitting minimization with fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) for acceleration. We
finally demonstrate its versatility and many benefits to a series of
signal/image processing and computer vision applications
Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)
The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on
Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster
collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas
through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its
second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque
town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th,
2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within
walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about
70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral
presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the
theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm":
Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional
subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph
sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity
and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness;
Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?;
Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website:
http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1
Discriminatively Trained Latent Ordinal Model for Video Classification
We study the problem of video classification for facial analysis and human
action recognition. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that
models the video as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative
sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for "smile", running and jumping for
"highjump"). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple
Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF -- it extends such frameworks to model
the ordinal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent
improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and
publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of
expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations and on three
challenging human action datasets. We also validate the method with qualitative
results and show that they largely support the intuitions behind the method.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TPAMI. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1604.0150
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