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Creating high definition maps that contain precise information of static elements of the scene is of utmost importance for enabling self driving cars to drive safely. In this paper, we tackle the problem of drivable road boundary extraction from LiDAR and camera imagery. Towards this goal, we design a structured model where a fully convolutional network obtains deep features encoding the location and direction of road boundaries and then, a convolutional recurrent network outputs a polyline representation for each one of them. Importantly, our method is fully automatic and does not require a user in the loop. We showcase the effectiveness of our method on a large North American city where we obtain perfect topology of road boundaries 99.3% of the time at a high precision and recall.
The binary segmentation of roads in very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images (RSIs) has always been a challenging task due to factors such as occlusions (caused by shadows, trees, buildings, etc.) and the intra-class variances of road surfaces. The wide use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has greatly improved the segmentation accuracy and made the task end-to-end trainable. However, there are still margins to improve in terms of the completeness and connectivity of the results. In this paper, we consider the specific context of road extraction and present a direction-aware residual network (DiResNet) that includes three main contributions: 1) An asymmetric residual segmentation network with deconvolutional layers and a structural supervision to enhance the learning of road topology (DiResSeg); 2) A pixel-level supervision of local directions to enhance the embedding of linear features; 3) A refinement network to optimize the segmentation results (DiResRef). Ablation studies on two benchmark datasets (the Massachusetts dataset and the DeepGlobe dataset) have confirmed the effectiveness of the presented designs. Comparative experiments with other approaches show that the proposed method has advantages in both overall accuracy and F1-score. The code is available at: https://github.com/ggsDing/DiResNet.
A novel centerline extraction framework is reported which combines an end-to-end trainable multi-task fully convolutional network (FCN) with a minimal path extractor. The FCN simultaneously computes centerline distance maps and detects branch endpoints. The method generates single-pixel-wide centerlines with no spurious branches. It handles arbitrary tree-structured object with no prior assumption regarding depth of the tree or its bifurcation pattern. It is also robust to substantial scale changes across different parts of the target object and minor imperfections of the objects segmentation mask. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep-learning based centerline extraction method that guarantees single-pixel-wide centerline for a complex tree-structured object. The proposed method is validated in coronary artery centerline extraction on a dataset of 620 patients (400 of which used as test set). This application is challenging due to the large number of coronary branches, branch tortuosity, and large variations in length, thickness, shape, etc. The proposed method generates well-positioned centerlines, exhibiting lower number of missing branches and is more robust in the presence of minor imperfections of the object segmentation mask. Compared to a state-of-the-art traditional minimal path approach, our method improves patient-level success rate of centerline extraction from 54.3% to 88.8% according to independent human expert review.
As a unique and promising biometric, video-based gait recognition has broad applications. The key step of this methodology is to learn the walking pattern of individuals, which, however, often suffers challenges to extract the behavioral feature from a sequence directly. Most existing methods just focus on either the appearance or the motion pattern. To overcome these limitations, we propose a sequential convolutional network (SCN) from a novel perspective, where spatiotemporal features can be learned by a basic convolutional backbone. In SCN, behavioral information extractors (BIE) are constructed to comprehend intermediate feature maps in time series through motion templates where the relationship between frames can be analyzed, thereby distilling the information of the walking pattern. Furthermore, a multi-frame aggregator in SCN performs feature integration on a sequence whose length is uncertain, via a mobile 3D convolutional layer. To demonstrate the effectiveness, experiments have been conducted on two popular public benchmarks, CASIA-B and OU-MVLP, and our approach is demonstrated superior performance, comparing with the state-of-art methods.
Pedestrian detection methods have been significantly improved with the development of deep convolutional neural networks. Nevertheless, robustly detecting pedestrians with a large variant on sizes and with occlusions remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a gated multi-layer convolutional feature extraction method which can adaptively generate discriminative features for candidate pedestrian regions. The proposed gated feature extraction framework consists of squeeze units, gate units and a concatenation layer which perform feature dimension squeezing, feature elements manipulation and convolutional features combination from multiple CNN layers, respectively. We proposed two different gate models which can manipulate the regional feature maps in a channel-wise selection manner and a spatial-wise selection manner, respectively. Experiments on the challenging CityPersons dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially on detecting those small-size and occluded pedestrians.
Crack is one of the most common road distresses which may pose road safety hazards. Generally, crack detection is performed by either certified inspectors or structural engineers. This task is, however, time-consuming, subjective and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel road crack detection algorithm based on deep learning and adaptive image segmentation. Firstly, a deep convolutional neural network is trained to determine whether an image contains cracks or not. The images containing cracks are then smoothed using bilateral filtering, which greatly minimizes the number of noisy pixels. Finally, we utilize an adaptive thresholding method to extract the cracks from road surface. The experimental results illustrate that our network can classify images with an accuracy of 99.92%, and the cracks can be successfully extracted from the images using our proposed thresholding algorithm.