Mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Remote Sensing: Techniques, Applications, and Prospects

The past few decades have witnessed the great progress of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) in civilian fields, especially in photogrammetry and remote sensing. In contrast with the platforms of manned aircraft and satellite, the UAV platform holds many promising characteristics: flexibility, efficiency, high-spatial/temporal resolution, low cost, easy operation, etc., which make it an effective complement to other remote-sensing platforms and a cost-effective means for remote sensing. Considering the popularity and expansion of UAV-based remote sensing in recent years, this paper provides a systematic survey on the recent advances and future prospectives of UAVs in the remote-sensing community. Specifically, the main challenges and key technologies of remote-sensing data processing based on UAVs are discussed and summarized firstly. Then, we provide an overview of the widespread applications of UAVs in remote sensing. Finally, some prospects for future work are discussed. We hope this paper will provide remote-sensing researchers an overall picture of recent UAV-based remote sensing developments and help guide the further research on this topic

Cone Detection using a Combination of LiDAR and Vision-based Machine Learning

The classification and the position estimation of objects become more and more relevant as the field of robotics is expanding in diverse areas of society. In this Bachelor Thesis, we developed a cone detection algorithm for an autonomous car using a LiDAR sensor and a colour camera. By evaluating simple constraints, the LiDAR detection algorithm preselects cone candidates in the 3 dimensional space. The candidates are projected into the image plane of the colour camera and an image candidate is cropped out. A convolutional neural networks classifies the image candidates as cone or not a cone. With the fusion of the precise position estimation of the LiDAR sensor and the high classification accuracy of a neural network, a reliable cone detection algorithm was implemented. Furthermore, a path planning algorithm generates a path around the detected cones. The final system detects cones even at higher velocity and has the potential to drive fully autonomous around the cones

Deep Multi-Sensor Lane Detection

Reliable and accurate lane detection has been a long-standing problem in the field of autonomous driving. In recent years, many approaches have been developed that use images (or videos) as input and reason in image space. In this paper we argue that accurate image estimates do not translate to precise 3D lane boundaries, which are the input required by modern motion planning algorithms. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep neural network that takes advantage of both LiDAR and camera sensors and produces very accurate estimates directly in 3D space. We demonstrate the performance of our approach on both highways and in cities, and show very accurate estimates in complex scenarios such as heavy traffic (which produces occlusion), fork, merges and intersections.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201

LO-Net: Deep Real-time Lidar Odometry

We present a novel deep convolutional network pipeline, LO-Net, for real-time lidar odometry estimation. Unlike most existing lidar odometry (LO) estimations that go through individually designed feature selection, feature matching, and pose estimation pipeline, LO-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner. With a new mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, LO-Net can effectively learn feature representation for LO estimation, and can implicitly exploit the sequential dependencies and dynamics in the data. We also design a scan-to-map module, which uses the geometric and semantic information learned in LO-Net, to improve the estimation accuracy. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LO-Net outperforms existing learning based approaches and has similar accuracy with the state-of-the-art geometry-based approach, LOAM

User assisted and automatic inverse procedural road modelling at the city scale

Cities are structured by roads. Having up to date and detailed maps of these is thus an important challenge for urban planing, civil engineering and transportation. Those maps are traditionally created manually, which represents a massive amount of work, and may discard recent or temporary changes. For these reasons, automated map building has been a long time goal, either for road network reconstruction or for local road surface reconstruction from low level observations. In this work, we navigate between these two goals. Starting from an approximate road axis (+ width) network as a simple road modelling, we propose to use observations of street features and optimisation to improve the coarse model. Observations are generic, and as such, can be derived from various data, such as aerial images, street images and street Lidar, other GIS data, and complementary user input. Starting from an initial road modelling which is at a median distance of 1.5 metre from the sidewalk ground-truth, our method has the potential to robustly optimise the road modelling so the median distance reaches 0.45 metre fully automatically, with better results possible using user inputs and/or more precise observations. The robust non linear least square optimisation used is extremely fast, with computing time from few minutes (whole Paris) to less than a second for a few blocks. The proposed approach is simple, very fast and produces a credible road model. These promising results open the way to various applications, such as integration in an interactive framework, or integration in a more powerful optimisation method, which would be able to further segment road network and use more complex road model.Comment: Article extracted form PhD (chap5

Multi-Modal Graph Interaction for Multi-Graph Convolution Network in Urban Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Graph convolution network based approaches have been recently used to model region-wise relationships in region-level prediction problems in urban computing. Each relationship represents a kind of spatial dependency, like region-wise distance or functional similarity. To incorporate multiple relationships into spatial feature extraction, we define the problem as a multi-modal machine learning problem on multi-graph convolution networks. Leveraging the advantage of multi-modal machine learning, we propose to develop modality interaction mechanisms for this problem, in order to reduce generalization error by reinforcing the learning of multimodal coordinated representations. In this work, we propose two interaction techniques for handling features in lower layers and higher layers respectively. In lower layers, we propose grouped GCN to combine the graph connectivity from different modalities for more complete spatial feature extraction. In higher layers, we adapt multi-linear relationship networks to GCN by exploring the dimension transformation and freezing part of the covariance structure. The adapted approach, called multi-linear relationship GCN, learns more generalized features to overcome the train-test divergence induced by time shifting. We evaluated our model on ridehailing demand forecasting problem using two real-world datasets. The proposed technique outperforms state-of-the art baselines in terms of prediction accuracy, training efficiency, interpretability and model robustness

Detection, Recognition and Tracking of Moving Objects from Real-time Video via Visual Vocabulary Model and Species Inspired PSO

In this paper, we address the basic problem of recognizing moving objects in video images using Visual Vocabulary model and Bag of Words and track our object of interest in the subsequent video frames using species inspired PSO. Initially, the shadow free images are obtained by background modelling followed by foreground modeling to extract the blobs of our object of interest. Subsequently, we train a cubic SVM with human body datasets in accordance with our domain of interest for recognition and tracking. During training, using the principle of Bag of Words we extract necessary features of certain domains and objects for classification. Subsequently, matching these feature sets with those of the extracted object blobs that are obtained by subtracting the shadow free background from the foreground, we detect successfully our object of interest from the test domain. The performance of the classification by cubic SVM is satisfactorily represented by confusion matrix and ROC curve reflecting the accuracy of each module. After classification, our object of interest is tracked in the test domain using species inspired PSO. By combining the adaptive learning tools with the efficient classification of description, we achieve optimum accuracy in recognition of the moving objects. We evaluate our algorithm benchmark datasets: iLIDS, VIVID, Walking2, Woman. Comparative analysis of our algorithm against the existing state-of-the-art trackers shows very satisfactory and competitive results

Intelligent manipulation technique for multi-branch robotic systems

New analytical development in kinematics planning is reported. The INtelligent KInematics Planner (INKIP) consists of the kinematics spline theory and the adaptive logic annealing process. Also, a novel framework of robot learning mechanism is introduced. The FUzzy LOgic Self Organized Neural Networks (FULOSONN) integrates fuzzy logic in commands, control, searching, and reasoning, the embedded expert system for nominal robotics knowledge implementation, and the self organized neural networks for the dynamic knowledge evolutionary process. Progress on the mechanical construction of SRA Advanced Robotic System (SRAARS) and the real time robot vision system is also reported. A decision was made to incorporate the Local Area Network (LAN) technology in the overall communication system

Robust Lane Detection from Continuous Driving Scenes Using Deep Neural Networks

Lane detection in driving scenes is an important module for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. In recent years, many sophisticated lane detection methods have been proposed. However, most methods focus on detecting the lane from one single image, and often lead to unsatisfactory performance in handling some extremely-bad situations such as heavy shadow, severe mark degradation, serious vehicle occlusion, and so on. In fact, lanes are continuous line structures on the road. Consequently, the lane that cannot be accurately detected in one current frame may potentially be inferred out by incorporating information of previous frames. To this end, we investigate lane detection by using multiple frames of a continuous driving scene, and propose a hybrid deep architecture by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the recurrent neural network (RNN). Specifically, information of each frame is abstracted by a CNN block, and the CNN features of multiple continuous frames, holding the property of time-series, are then fed into the RNN block for feature learning and lane prediction. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that, the proposed method outperforms the competing methods in lane detection, especially in handling difficult situations.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 69(1), 202

Automatic detection of passable roads after floods in remote sensed and social media data

This paper addresses the problem of floods classification and floods aftermath detection utilizing both social media and satellite imagery. Automatic detection of disasters such as floods is still a very challenging task. The focus lies on identifying passable routes or roads during floods. Two novel solutions are presented, which were developed for two corresponding tasks at the MediaEval 2018 benchmarking challenge. The tasks are (i) identification of images providing evidence for road passability and (ii) differentiation and detection of passable and non-passable roads in images from two complementary sources of information. For the first challenge, we mainly rely on object and scene-level features extracted through multiple deep models pre-trained on the ImageNet and Places datasets. The object and scene-level features are then combined using early, late and double fusion techniques. To identify whether or not it is possible for a vehicle to pass a road in satellite images, we rely on Convolutional Neural Networks and a transfer learning-based classification approach. The evaluation of the proposed methods are carried out on the large-scale datasets provided for the benchmark competition. The results demonstrate significant improvement in the performance over the recent state-of-art approaches