End-to-End Tracking and Semantic Segmentation Using Recurrent Neural Networks

In this work we present a novel end-to-end framework for tracking and classifying a robot's surroundings in complex, dynamic and only partially observable real-world environments. The approach deploys a recurrent neural network to filter an input stream of raw laser measurements in order to directly infer object locations, along with their identity in both visible and occluded areas. To achieve this we first train the network using unsupervised Deep Tracking, a recently proposed theoretical framework for end-to-end space occupancy prediction. We show that by learning to track on a large amount of unsupervised data, the network creates a rich internal representation of its environment which we in turn exploit through the principle of inductive transfer of knowledge to perform the task of it's semantic classification. As a result, we show that only a small amount of labelled data suffices to steer the network towards mastering this additional task. Furthermore we propose a novel recurrent neural network architecture specifically tailored to tracking and semantic classification in real-world robotics applications. We demonstrate the tracking and classification performance of the method on real-world data collected at a busy road junction. Our evaluation shows that the proposed end-to-end framework compares favourably to a state-of-the-art, model-free tracking solution and that it outperforms a conventional one-shot training scheme for semantic classification

GUSOT: Green and Unsupervised Single Object Tracking for Long Video Sequences

Supervised and unsupervised deep trackers that rely on deep learning technologies are popular in recent years. Yet, they demand high computational complexity and a high memory cost. A green unsupervised single-object tracker, called GUSOT, that aims at object tracking for long videos under a resource-constrained environment is proposed in this work. Built upon a baseline tracker, UHP-SOT++, which works well for short-term tracking, GUSOT contains two additional new modules: 1) lost object recovery, and 2) color-saliency-based shape proposal. They help resolve the tracking loss problem and offer a more flexible object proposal, respectively. Thus, they enable GUSOT to achieve higher tracking accuracy in the long run. We conduct experiments on the large-scale dataset LaSOT with long video sequences, and show that GUSOT offers a lightweight high-performance tracking solution that finds applications in mobile and edge computing platforms

Clustering Learning for Robotic Vision

We present the clustering learning technique applied to multi-layer feedforward deep neural networks. We show that this unsupervised learning technique can compute network filters with only a few minutes and a much reduced set of parameters. The goal of this paper is to promote the technique for general-purpose robotic vision systems. We report its use in static image datasets and object tracking datasets. We show that networks trained with clustering learning can outperform large networks trained for many hours on complex datasets.Comment: Code for this paper is available here: https://github.com/culurciello/CL_paper1_cod

Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations using Videos

Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual representations. Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision. That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other tasks such as surface-normal estimation

Memory Based Online Learning of Deep Representations from Video Streams

We present a novel online unsupervised method for face identity learning from video streams. The method exploits deep face descriptors together with a memory based learning mechanism that takes advantage of the temporal coherence of visual data. Specifically, we introduce a discriminative feature matching solution based on Reverse Nearest Neighbour and a feature forgetting strategy that detect redundant features and discard them appropriately while time progresses. It is shown that the proposed learning procedure is asymptotically stable and can be effectively used in relevant applications like multiple face identification and tracking from unconstrained video streams. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves comparable results in the task of multiple face tracking and better performance in face identification with offline approaches exploiting future information. Code will be publicly available.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1708.0361