13,878 research outputs found
Don't Look Back: Robustifying Place Categorization for Viewpoint- and Condition-Invariant Place Recognition
When a human drives a car along a road for the first time, they later
recognize where they are on the return journey typically without needing to
look in their rear-view mirror or turn around to look back, despite significant
viewpoint and appearance change. Such navigation capabilities are typically
attributed to our semantic visual understanding of the environment [1] beyond
geometry to recognizing the types of places we are passing through such as
"passing a shop on the left" or "moving through a forested area". Humans are in
effect using place categorization [2] to perform specific place recognition
even when the viewpoint is 180 degrees reversed. Recent advances in deep neural
networks have enabled high-performance semantic understanding of visual places
and scenes, opening up the possibility of emulating what humans do. In this
work, we develop a novel methodology for using the semantics-aware higher-order
layers of deep neural networks for recognizing specific places from within a
reference database. To further improve the robustness to appearance change, we
develop a descriptor normalization scheme that builds on the success of
normalization schemes for pure appearance-based techniques such as SeqSLAM [3].
Using two different datasets - one road-based, one pedestrian-based, we
evaluate the performance of the system in performing place recognition on
reverse traversals of a route with a limited field of view camera and no
turn-back-and-look behaviours, and compare to existing state-of-the-art
techniques and vanilla off-the-shelf features. The results demonstrate
significant improvements over the existing state of the art, especially for
extreme perceptual challenges that involve both great viewpoint change and
environmental appearance change. We also provide experimental analyses of the
contributions of the various system components.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, ICRA 201
Multi-Context Attention for Human Pose Estimation
In this paper, we propose to incorporate convolutional neural networks with a
multi-context attention mechanism into an end-to-end framework for human pose
estimation. We adopt stacked hourglass networks to generate attention maps from
features at multiple resolutions with various semantics. The Conditional Random
Field (CRF) is utilized to model the correlations among neighboring regions in
the attention map. We further combine the holistic attention model, which
focuses on the global consistency of the full human body, and the body part
attention model, which focuses on the detailed description for different body
parts. Hence our model has the ability to focus on different granularity from
local salient regions to global semantic-consistent spaces. Additionally, we
design novel Hourglass Residual Units (HRUs) to increase the receptive field of
the network. These units are extensions of residual units with a side branch
incorporating filters with larger receptive fields, hence features with various
scales are learned and combined within the HRUs. The effectiveness of the
proposed multi-context attention mechanism and the hourglass residual units is
evaluated on two widely used human pose estimation benchmarks. Our approach
outperforms all existing methods on both benchmarks over all the body parts.Comment: The first two authors contribute equally to this wor
Semantic Visual Localization
Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a
fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this
problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance,
e.g., in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or
autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint
3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed
under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel
generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene completion
as an auxiliary task. The resulting 3D descriptors are robust to missing
observations by encoding high-level 3D geometric and semantic information.
Experiments on several challenging large-scale localization datasets
demonstrate reliable localization under extreme viewpoint, illumination, and
geometry changes
Improvement of the sensory and autonomous capability of robots through olfaction: the IRO Project
Proyecto de Excelencia Junta de Andalucía TEP2012-530Olfaction is a valuable source of information about the environment that has not been su ciently exploited in mobile robotics
yet. Certainly, odor information can contribute to other sensing modalities, e.g. vision, to successfully accomplish high-level robot
activities, such as task planning or execution in human environments. This paper describes the developments carried out in the scope of the IRO project, which aims at making progress in this direction by investigating mechanisms that exploit odor information (usually coming in the form of the type of volatile and its concentration) in problems like object recognition and scene-activity understanding. A distinctive aspect of this research is the special attention paid to the role of semantics within the robot perception and decisionmaking processes. The results of the IRO project have improved the robot capabilities in terms of efciency, autonomy and usefulness.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec
Inferring Room Semantics Using Acoustic Monitoring
Having knowledge of the environmental context of the user i.e. the knowledge
of the users' indoor location and the semantics of their environment, can
facilitate the development of many of location-aware applications. In this
paper, we propose an acoustic monitoring technique that infers semantic
knowledge about an indoor space \emph{over time,} using audio recordings from
it. Our technique uses the impulse response of these spaces as well as the
ambient sounds produced in them in order to determine a semantic label for
them. As we process more recordings, we update our \emph{confidence} in the
assigned label. We evaluate our technique on a dataset of single-speaker human
speech recordings obtained in different types of rooms at three university
buildings. In our evaluation, the confidence\emph{ }for the true label
generally outstripped the confidence for all other labels and in some cases
converged to 100\% with less than 30 samples.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal
Processing, Sept.\ 25--28, 2017, Tokyo, Japa
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