Event-based Vision meets Deep Learning on Steering Prediction for Self-driving Cars

Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that naturally capture the dynamics of a scene, filtering out redundant information. This paper presents a deep neural network approach that unlocks the potential of event cameras on a challenging motion-estimation task: prediction of a vehicle's steering angle. To make the best out of this sensor-algorithm combination, we adapt state-of-the-art convolutional architectures to the output of event sensors and extensively evaluate the performance of our approach on a publicly available large scale event-camera dataset (~1000 km). We present qualitative and quantitative explanations of why event cameras allow robust steering prediction even in cases where traditional cameras fail, e.g. challenging illumination conditions and fast motion. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of leveraging transfer learning from traditional to event-based vision, and show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms based on standard cameras.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Video: https://youtu.be/_r_bsjkJTH

Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem that has a large amount of applications such as aiding in gaze estimation, modeling attention, fitting 3D models to video and performing face alignment. Traditionally head pose is computed by estimating some keypoints from the target face and solving the 2D to 3D correspondence problem with a mean human head model. We argue that this is a fragile method because it relies entirely on landmark detection performance, the extraneous head model and an ad-hoc fitting step. We present an elegant and robust way to determine pose by training a multi-loss convolutional neural network on 300W-LP, a large synthetically expanded dataset, to predict intrinsic Euler angles (yaw, pitch and roll) directly from image intensities through joint binned pose classification and regression. We present empirical tests on common in-the-wild pose benchmark datasets which show state-of-the-art results. Additionally we test our method on a dataset usually used for pose estimation using depth and start to close the gap with state-of-the-art depth pose methods. We open-source our training and testing code as well as release our pre-trained models.Comment: Accepted to Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2018 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 201