Fast LIDAR-based Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road detection using only LIDAR data. Starting from an unstructured point cloud, top-view images encoding several basic statistics such as mean elevation and density are generated. By considering a top-view representation, road detection is reduced to a single-scale problem that can be addressed with a simple and fast fully convolutional neural network (FCN). The FCN is specifically designed for the task of pixel-wise semantic segmentation by combining a large receptive field with high-resolution feature maps. The proposed system achieved excellent performance and it is among the top-performing algorithms on the KITTI road benchmark. Its fast inference makes it particularly suitable for real-time applications

LIDAR-Camera Fusion for Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road detection by fusing LIDAR point clouds and camera images. An unstructured and sparse point cloud is first projected onto the camera image plane and then upsampled to obtain a set of dense 2D images encoding spatial information. Several fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) are then trained to carry out road detection, either by using data from a single sensor, or by using three fusion strategies: early, late, and the newly proposed cross fusion. Whereas in the former two fusion approaches, the integration of multimodal information is carried out at a predefined depth level, the cross fusion FCN is designed to directly learn from data where to integrate information; this is accomplished by using trainable cross connections between the LIDAR and the camera processing branches. To further highlight the benefits of using a multimodal system for road detection, a data set consisting of visually challenging scenes was extracted from driving sequences of the KITTI raw data set. It was then demonstrated that, as expected, a purely camera-based FCN severely underperforms on this data set. A multimodal system, on the other hand, is still able to provide high accuracy. Finally, the proposed cross fusion FCN was evaluated on the KITTI road benchmark where it achieved excellent performance, with a MaxF score of 96.03%, ranking it among the top-performing approaches

Intelligent Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Road Crack Detection

This paper presents a novel intelligent system based on graph convolutional neural networks to study road crack detection in intelligent transportation systems. The visual features of the input images are first computed using the well-known Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) extraction algorithm. Then, a correlation between SIFT features of similar images is analyzed and a series of graphs are generated. The graphs are trained on a graph convolutional neural network, and a hyper-optimization algorithm is developed to supervise the training process. A case study of road crack detection data is analyzed. The results show a clear superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, the precision of the proposed solution exceeds 70%, while the precision of the baseline methods does not exceed 60%.acceptedVersio

Multi-stage Suture Detection for Robot Assisted Anastomosis based on Deep Learning

In robotic surgery, task automation and learning from demonstration combined with human supervision is an emerging trend for many new surgical robot platforms. One such task is automated anastomosis, which requires bimanual needle handling and suture detection. Due to the complexity of the surgical environment and varying patient anatomies, reliable suture detection is difficult, which is further complicated by occlusion and thread topologies. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage framework for suture thread detection based on deep learning. Fully convolutional neural networks are used to obtain the initial detection and the overlapping status of suture thread, which are later fused with the original image to learn a gradient road map of the thread. Based on the gradient road map, multiple segments of the thread are extracted and linked to form the whole thread using a curvilinear structure detector. Experiments on two different types of sutures demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed framework.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 201

Recognition and Detection of Vehicle License Plates Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The rise in toll road usage has sparked a lot of interest in the newest, most effective, and most innovative intelligent transportation system (ITS), such as the Vehicle License Plate Recognition (VLPR) approach. This research uses Convolutional Neural Networks to deliver effective deep learning principally based on Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for detection and recognition of numerous License Plates (LPs) (CNN). Two fully convolutional one-stage object detectors are utilized in ALPRNet to concurrently identify and categorize LPs and characters, followed by an assembly module that outputs the LP strings. Object detectors are typically employed in CNN-based approaches such as You Only Look Once (YOLO), Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), and Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) to locate LPs. The VLPR model is used here to detect license plates using You Only Look Once (YOLO) and to recognize characters in license plates using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Unlike existing methods, which treat license plate detection and recognition as two independent problems to be solved one at a time, the proposed method accomplishes both goals using a single network. Matlab R2020a was used as a tool

Recognition and Detection of Vehicle License Plates Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The rise in toll road usage has sparked a lot of interest in the newest, most effective, and most innovative intelligent transportation system (ITS), such as the Vehicle License Plate Recognition (VLPR) approach. This research uses Convolutional Neural Networks to deliver effective deep learning principally based on Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for detection and recognition of numerous License Plates (LPs) (CNN). Two fully convolutional one-stage object detectors are utilized in ALPRNet to concurrently identify and categorize LPs and characters, followed by an assembly module that outputs the LP strings. Object detectors are typically employed in CNN-based approaches such as You Only Look Once (YOLO), Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), and Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) to locate LPs. The VLPR model is used here to detect license plates using You Only Look Once (YOLO) and to recognize characters in license plates using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Unlike existing methods, which treat license plate detection and recognition as two independent problems to be solved one at a time, the proposed method accomplishes both goals using a single network. Matlab R2020a was used as a tool