MOR-UAV: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines for Moving Object Recognition in UAV Videos

Visual data collected from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has opened a new frontier of computer vision that requires automated analysis of aerial images/videos. However, the existing UAV datasets primarily focus on object detection. An object detector does not differentiate between the moving and non-moving objects. Given a real-time UAV video stream, how can we both localize and classify the moving objects, i.e. perform moving object recognition (MOR)? The MOR is one of the essential tasks to support various UAV vision-based applications including aerial surveillance, search and rescue, event recognition, urban and rural scene understanding.To the best of our knowledge, no labeled dataset is available for MOR evaluation in UAV videos. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MOR-UAV, a large-scale video dataset for MOR in aerial videos. We achieve this by labeling axis-aligned bounding boxes for moving objects which requires less computational resources than producing pixel-level estimates. We annotate 89,783 moving object instances collected from 30 UAV videos, consisting of 10,948 frames in various scenarios such as weather conditions, occlusion, changing flying altitude and multiple camera views. We assigned the labels for two categories of vehicles (car and heavy vehicle). Furthermore, we propose a deep unified framework MOR-UAVNet for MOR in UAV videos. Since, this is a first attempt for MOR in UAV videos, we present 16 baseline results based on the proposed framework over the MOR-UAV dataset through quantitative and qualitative experiments. We also analyze the motion-salient regions in the network through multiple layer visualizations. The MOR-UAVNet works online at inference as it requires only few past frames. Moreover, it doesn't require predefined target initialization from user. Experiments also demonstrate that the MOR-UAV dataset is quite challenging

Learning by Analogy: Reliable Supervision from Transformations for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation

Unsupervised learning of optical flow, which leverages the supervision from view synthesis, has emerged as a promising alternative to supervised methods. However, the objective of unsupervised learning is likely to be unreliable in challenging scenes. In this work, we present a framework to use more reliable supervision from transformations. It simply twists the general unsupervised learning pipeline by running another forward pass with transformed data from augmentation, along with using transformed predictions of original data as the self-supervision signal. Besides, we further introduce a lightweight network with multiple frames by a highly-shared flow decoder. Our method consistently gets a leap of performance on several benchmarks with the best accuracy among deep unsupervised methods. Also, our method achieves competitive results to recent fully supervised methods while with much fewer parameters.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2020, https://github.com/lliuz/ARFlo

Unsupervised Monocular Depth Reconstruction of Non-Rigid Scenes

Monocular depth reconstruction of complex and dynamic scenes is a highly challenging problem. While for rigid scenes learning-based methods have been offering promising results even in unsupervised cases, there exists little to no literature addressing the same for dynamic and deformable scenes. In this work, we present an unsupervised monocular framework for dense depth estimation of dynamic scenes, which jointly reconstructs rigid and non-rigid parts without explicitly modelling the camera motion. Using dense correspondences, we derive a training objective that aims to opportunistically preserve pairwise distances between reconstructed 3D points. In this process, the dense depth map is learned implicitly using the as-rigid-as-possible hypothesis. Our method provides promising results, demonstrating its capability of reconstructing 3D from challenging videos of non-rigid scenes. Furthermore, the proposed method also provides unsupervised motion segmentation results as an auxiliary output