8,722 research outputs found
Controlling Steering Angle for Cooperative Self-driving Vehicles utilizing CNN and LSTM-based Deep Networks
A fundamental challenge in autonomous vehicles is adjusting the steering
angle at different road conditions. Recent state-of-the-art solutions
addressing this challenge include deep learning techniques as they provide
end-to-end solution to predict steering angles directly from the raw input
images with higher accuracy. Most of these works ignore the temporal
dependencies between the image frames. In this paper, we tackle the problem of
utilizing multiple sets of images shared between two autonomous vehicles to
improve the accuracy of controlling the steering angle by considering the
temporal dependencies between the image frames. This problem has not been
studied in the literature widely. We present and study a new deep architecture
to predict the steering angle automatically by using Long-Short-Term-Memory
(LSTM) in our deep architecture. Our deep architecture is an end-to-end network
that utilizes CNN, LSTM and fully connected (FC) layers and it uses both
present and futures images (shared by a vehicle ahead via Vehicle-to-Vehicle
(V2V) communication) as input to control the steering angle. Our model
demonstrates the lowest error when compared to the other existing approaches in
the literature.Comment: Accepted in IV 2019, 6 pages, 9 figure
Real-to-Virtual Domain Unification for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
In the spectrum of vision-based autonomous driving, vanilla end-to-end models
are not interpretable and suboptimal in performance, while mediated perception
models require additional intermediate representations such as segmentation
masks or detection bounding boxes, whose annotation can be prohibitively
expensive as we move to a larger scale. More critically, all prior works fail
to deal with the notorious domain shift if we were to merge data collected from
different sources, which greatly hinders the model generalization ability. In
this work, we address the above limitations by taking advantage of virtual data
collected from driving simulators, and present DU-drive, an unsupervised
real-to-virtual domain unification framework for end-to-end autonomous driving.
It first transforms real driving data to its less complex counterpart in the
virtual domain and then predicts vehicle control commands from the generated
virtual image. Our framework has three unique advantages: 1) it maps driving
data collected from a variety of source distributions into a unified domain,
effectively eliminating domain shift; 2) the learned virtual representation is
simpler than the input real image and closer in form to the "minimum sufficient
statistic" for the prediction task, which relieves the burden of the
compression phase while optimizing the information bottleneck tradeoff and
leads to superior prediction performance; 3) it takes advantage of annotated
virtual data which is unlimited and free to obtain. Extensive experiments on
two public driving datasets and two driving simulators demonstrate the
performance superiority and interpretive capability of DU-drive
Towards Practical Verification of Machine Learning: The Case of Computer Vision Systems
Due to the increasing usage of machine learning (ML) techniques in security-
and safety-critical domains, such as autonomous systems and medical diagnosis,
ensuring correct behavior of ML systems, especially for different corner cases,
is of growing importance. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for
evaluating security and robustness of ML systems using different real-world
safety properties. We further design, implement and evaluate VeriVis, a
scalable methodology that can verify a diverse set of safety properties for
state-of-the-art computer vision systems with only blackbox access. VeriVis
leverage different input space reduction techniques for efficient verification
of different safety properties. VeriVis is able to find thousands of safety
violations in fifteen state-of-the-art computer vision systems including ten
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) such as Inception-v3 and Nvidia's Dave self-driving
system with thousands of neurons as well as five commercial third-party vision
APIs including Google vision and Clarifai for twelve different safety
properties. Furthermore, VeriVis can successfully verify local safety
properties, on average, for around 31.7% of the test images. VeriVis finds up
to 64.8x more violations than existing gradient-based methods that, unlike
VeriVis, cannot ensure non-existence of any violations. Finally, we show that
retraining using the safety violations detected by VeriVis can reduce the
average number of violations up to 60.2%.Comment: 16 pages, 11 tables, 11 figure
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Explainable and Advisable Learning for Self-driving Vehicles
Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers, etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Explanations may be triggered by the neural controller, namely introspective explanations, or informed by the neural controller's output, namely rationalizations. Our work has focused on the challenge of generating introspective explanations of deep models for self-driving vehicles. In Chapter 3, we begin by exploring the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). In the first stage, we use a visual attention model to train a convolution network end-to-end from images to steering angle. The attention model highlights image regions that potentially influence the network's output. Some of these are true influences, but some are spurious. We then apply a causal filtering step to determine which input regions actually influence the output. This produces more succinct visual explanations and more accurately exposes the network's behavior. In Chapter 4, we add an attention-based video-to-text model to produce textual explanations of model actions, e.g. "the car slows down because the road is wet". The attention maps of controller and explanation model are aligned so that explanations are grounded in the parts of the scene that mattered to the controller. We explore two approaches to attention alignment, strong- and weak-alignment. These explainable systems represent an externalization of tacit knowledge. The network's opaque reasoning is simplified to a situation-specific dependence on a visible object in the image. This makes them brittle and potentially unsafe in situations that do not match training data. In Chapter 5, we propose to address this issue by augmenting training data with natural language advice from a human. Advice includes guidance about what to do and where to attend. We present the first step toward advice-giving, where we train an end-to-end vehicle controller that accepts advice. The controller adapts the way it attends to the scene (visual attention) and the control (steering and speed). Further, in Chapter 6, we propose a new approach that learns vehicle control with the help of long-term (global) human advice. Specifically, our system learns to summarize its visual observations in natural language, predict an appropriate action response (e.g. "I see a pedestrian crossing, so I stop"), and predict the controls, accordingly
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
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