Enhancing perception for the visually impaired with deep learning techniques and low-cost wearable sensors

As estimated by the World Health Organization, there are millions of people who lives with some form of vision impairment. As a consequence, some of them present mobility problems in outdoor environments. With the aim of helping them, we propose in this work a system which is capable of delivering the position of potential obstacles in outdoor scenarios. Our approach is based on non-intrusive wearable devices and focuses also on being low-cost. First, a depth map of the scene is estimated from a color image, which provides 3D information of the environment. Then, an urban object detector is in charge of detecting the semantics of the objects in the scene. Finally, the three-dimensional and semantic data is summarized in a simpler representation of the potential obstacles the users have in front of them. This information is transmitted to the user through spoken or haptic feedback. Our system is able to run at about 3.8 fps and achieved a 87.99% mean accuracy in obstacle presence detection. Finally, we deployed our system in a pilot test which involved an actual person with vision impairment, who validated the effectiveness of our proposal for improving its navigation capabilities in outdoors.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515R Grant, supported with Feder funds, the University of Alicante project GRE16-19, and by the Valencian Government project GV/2018/022. Edmanuel Cruz is funded by a Panamenian grant for PhD studies IFARHU & SENACYT 270-2016-207. This work has also been supported by a Spanish grant for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243. Thanks also to Nvidia for the generous donation of a Titan Xp and a Quadro P6000

Geoffrey: An Automated Schedule System on a Social Robot for the Intellectually Challenged

The accelerated growth of the percentage of elder people and persons with brain injury-related conditions and who are intellectually challenged are some of the main concerns of the developed countries. These persons often require special cares and even almost permanent overseers that help them to carry out diary tasks. With this issue in mind, we propose an automated schedule system which is deployed on a social robot. The robot keeps track of the tasks that the patient has to fulfill in a diary basis. When a task is triggered, the robot guides the patient through its completion. The system is also able to detect if the steps are being properly carried out or not, issuing alerts in that case. To do so, an ensemble of deep learning techniques is used. The schedule is customizable by the carers and authorized relatives. Our system could enhance the quality of life of the patients and improve their self-autonomy. The experimentation, which was supervised by the ADACEA foundation, validates the achievement of these goalsThe accelerated growth of the percentage of elder people and persons with brain injury-related conditions and who are intellectually challenged are some of the main concerns of the developed countries. These persons often require special cares and even almost permanent overseers that help them to carry out diary tasks. With this issue in mind, we propose an automated schedule system which is deployed on a social robot. The robot keeps track of the tasks that the patient has to fulfill in a diary basis. When a task is triggered, the robot guides the patient through its completion. The system is also able to detect if the steps are being properly carried out or not, issuing alerts in that case. To do so, an ensemble of deep learning techniques is used. The schedule is customizable by the carers and authorized relatives. Our system could enhance the quality of life of the patients and improve their self-autonomy. The experimentation, which was supervised by the ADACEA foundation, validates the achievement of these goal

UASOL, a large-scale high-resolution outdoor stereo dataset

In this paper, we propose a new dataset for outdoor depth estimation from single and stereo RGB images. The dataset was acquired from the point of view of a pedestrian. Currently, the most novel approaches take advantage of deep learning-based techniques, which have proven to outperform traditional state-of-the-art computer vision methods. Nonetheless, these methods require large amounts of reliable ground-truth data. Despite there already existing several datasets that could be used for depth estimation, almost none of them are outdoor-oriented from an egocentric point of view. Our dataset introduces a large number of high-definition pairs of color frames and corresponding depth maps from a human perspective. In addition, the proposed dataset also features human interaction and great variability of data, as shown in this work.This work was supported by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515R Grant, supported with Feder funds. It was funded by the University of Alicante project GRE16-19, and by the Valencian Government project GV/2018/022. Edmanuel Cruz is funded by a Panamanian grant for PhD studies IFARHU & SENACYT 270-2016-207. This work was also supported by a Spanish grant for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243. Thanks also to NVIDIA for the generous donation of a Titan Xp and a Quadro P6000

Geoffrey: An Automated Schedule System on a Social Robot for the Intellectually Challenged

The accelerated growth of the percentage of elder people and persons with brain injury-related conditions and who are intellectually challenged are some of the main concerns of the developed countries. These persons often require special cares and even almost permanent overseers that help them to carry out diary tasks. With this issue in mind, we propose an automated schedule system which is deployed on a social robot. The robot keeps track of the tasks that the patient has to fulfill in a diary basis. When a task is triggered, the robot guides the patient through its completion. The system is also able to detect if the steps are being properly carried out or not, issuing alerts in that case. To do so, an ensemble of deep learning techniques is used. The schedule is customizable by the carers and authorized relatives. Our system could enhance the quality of life of the patients and improve their self-autonomy. The experimentation, which was supervised by the ADACEA foundation, validates the achievement of these goals.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515R Grant, supported with FEDER funds. Edmanuel Cruz is funded by a Panamanian grant for PhD studies IFARHU & SENACYT 270-2016-207. Jose Carlos Rangel was supported by the National System of Research (SNI) of the SENACYT of Panama. This work has also been supported by a Spanish grant for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243 and FPU16/00887

Monocular Depth Estimation: Datasets, Methods, and Applications

The World Health Organization (WHO) stated in February 2021 at the Seventy- Third World Health Assembly that, globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. They also denoted the severe impact vision impairment has on the quality of life of the individual suffering from this condition, how it affects the social well-being and their economic independence in society, becoming in some cases an additional burden to also people in their immediate surroundings. In order to minimize the costs and intrusiveness of the applications and maximize the autonomy of the individual life, the natural solution is using systems that rely on computer vision algorithms. The systems improving the quality of life of the visually impaired need to solve different problems such as: localization, path recognition, obstacle detection, environment description, navigation, etc. Each of these topics involves an additional set of problems that have to be solved to address it. For example, for the task of object detection, there is the need of depth prediction to know the distance to the object, path recognition to know if the user is on the road or on a pedestrian path, alarm system to provide notifications of danger for the user, trajectory prediction of the approaching obstacle, and those are only the main key points. Taking a closer look at all of these topics, they have one key component in common: depth estimation/prediction. All of these topics are in need of a correct estimation of the depth in the scenario. In this thesis, our main focus relies on addressing depth estimation in indoor and outdoor environments. Traditional depth estimation methods, like structure from motion and stereo matching, are built on feature correspondences from multiple viewpoints. Despite the effectiveness of these approaches, they need a specific type of data for their proper performance. Since our main goal is to provide systems with minimal costs and intrusiveness that are also easy to handle we decided to infer the depth from single images: monocular depth estimation. Estimating depth of a scene from a single image is a simple task for humans, but it is notoriously more difficult for computational models to be able to achieve high accuracy and low resource requirements. Monocular Depth Estimation is this very task of estimating depth from a single RGB image. Since there is only a need of one image, this approach is used in applications such as autonomous driving, scene understanding or 3D modeling where other type of information is not available. This thesis presents contributions towards solving this task using deep learning as the main tool. The four main contributions of this thesis are: first, we carry out an extensive review of the state-of-the-art in monocular depth estimation; secondly, we introduce a novel large scale high resolution outdoor stereo dataset able to provide enough image information to solve various common computer vision problems; thirdly, we show a set of architectures able to predict monocular depth effectively; and, at last, we propose two real life applications of those architectures, addressing the topic of enhancing the perception for the visually impaired using low-cost wearable sensors

Refining the Fusion of Pepper Robot and Estimated Depth Maps Method for Improved 3D Perception

As it is well known, some versions of the Pepper robot provide poor depth perception due to the lenses it has in front of the tridimensional sensor. In this paper, we present a method to improving that faulty 3D perception. Our proposal is based on a combination of the actual depth readings of Pepper and a deep learning-based monocular depth estimation. As shown, the combination of both of them provides a better 3D representation of the scene. In previous works we made an initial approximation of this fusion technique, but it had some drawbacks. In this paper we analyze the pros and cons of the Pepper readings, the monocular depth estimation method and our previous fusion method. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed fusion method outperforms them all.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government, through Feder funds under Grant TIN2016-76515R, and in part by the Spanish Grant for Ph.D. studies under Grant ACIF/2017/243 and Grant FPU16/00887. The work of E. Cruz was supported by the Panamenian Grant for Ph.D. studies IFARHU & SENACYT under Grant 270-2016-207

Finding the Place: How to Train and Use Convolutional Neural Networks for a Dynamically Learning Robot

For a robot, the ability to adapt his knowledge automatically and customize its behavior is a key feature. Furthermore, a robot should be able to carry out its tasks at a long-term basis, performing it seamlessly in presence of changes in their surroundings. To do that, it is essential that the robot dynamically learn from their environment, but to perform a fully retraining of a deep learning architecture when the model needs new knowledge is a highly time consuming task. This work focus on exploring several strategies to include new data to an already learned model, applied to the semantic localization problem focusing in the accuracy of the final model and their training time. Exhaustive experimentation is carried out and each result is discussed consequently.For a robot, the ability to adapt his knowledge automatically and customize its behavior is a key feature. Furthermore, a robot should be able to carry out its tasks at a long-term basis, performing it seamlessly in presence of changes in their surroundings. To do that, it is essential that the robot dynamically learn from their environment, but to perform a fully retraining of a deep learning architecture when the model needs new knowledge is a highly time consuming task. This work focus on exploring several strategies to include new data to an already learned model, applied to the semantic localization problem focusing in the accuracy of the final model and their training time. Exhaustive experimentation is carried out and each result is discussed consequently

COMBAHO: A deep learning system for integrating brain injury patients in society

In the last years, the care of dependent people, either by disease, accident, disability, or age, is one of the current priority research topics in developed countries. Moreover, such care is intended to be at patients home, in order to minimize the cost of therapies. Patients rehabilitation will be fulfilled when their integration in society is achieved, either in the family or in a work environment. To address this challenge, we propose the development and evaluation of an assistant for people with acquired brain injury or dependents. This assistant is twofold: in the patient’s home is based on the design and use of an intelligent environment with abilities to monitor and active learning, combined with an autonomous social robot for interactive assistance and stimulation. On the other hand, it is complemented with an outdoor assistant, to help patients under disorientation or complex situations. This involves the integration of several existing technologies and provides solutions to a variety of technological challenges. Deep leaning-based techniques are proposed as core technology to solve these problems.This work has been funded by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515-R grant for the COMBAHO project, supported with Feder funds. It has also been supported by the University of Alicante project GRE16-19 and the Valencian Government GV/2018/022. This work has also been supported by Spanish grants for PhD studies FPU15/04516 and ACIF/2017/243. Experiments were made possible by a generous hardware donation from NVIDIA