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Register a new userFlying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the Visually Impaired Utilizing Drones and Transformer-based Semantic Segmentation
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Added by
Kailun Yang
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Lacking the ability to sense ambient environments effectively, blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) face difficulty in walking outdoors, especially in urban areas. Therefore, tools for assisting BVIP are of great importance. In this paper, we propose a novel flying guide dog prototype for BVIP assistance using drone and street view semantic segmentation. Based on the walkable areas extracted from the segmentation prediction, the drone can adjust its movement automatically and thus lead the user to walk along the walkable path. By recognizing the color of pedestrian traffic lights, our prototype can help the user to cross a street safely. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset named Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Lights (PVTL), which is dedicated to traffic light recognition. The result of our user study in real-world scenarios shows that our prototype is effective and easy to use, providing new insight into BVIP assistance.
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Common fully glazed facades and transparent objects present architectural barriers and impede the mobility of people with low vision or blindness, for instance, a path detected behind a glass door is inaccessible unless it is correctly perceived and reacted. However, segmenting these safety-critical objects is rarely covered by conventional assistive technologies. To tackle this issue, we construct a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) model, which is capable of segmenting general and transparent objects and performing real-time wayfinding to assist people walking alone more safely. Especially, both decoders created by our proposed Transformer Parsing Module (TPM) enable effective joint learning from different datasets. Besides, the efficient Trans4Trans model composed of symmetric transformer-based encoder and decoder, requires little computational expenses and is readily deployed on portable GPUs. Our Trans4Trans model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the test sets of Stanford2D3D and Trans10K-v2 datasets and obtains mIoU of 45.13% and 75.14%, respectively. Through various pre-tests and a user study conducted in indoor and outdoor scenarios, the usability and reliability of our assistive system have been extensively verified.
Independently exploring unknown spaces or finding objects in an indoor environment is a daily but challenging task for visually impaired people. However, common 2D assistive systems lack depth relationships between various objects, resulting in difficulty to obtain accurate spatial layout and relative positions of objects. To tackle these issues, we propose HIDA, a lightweight assistive system based on 3D point cloud instance segmentation with a solid-state LiDAR sensor, for holistic indoor detection and avoidance. Our entire system consists of three hardware components, two interactive functions~(obstacle avoidance and object finding) and a voice user interface. Based on voice guidance, the point cloud from the most recent state of the changing indoor environment is captured through an on-site scanning performed by the user. In addition, we design a point cloud segmentation model with dual lightweight decoders for semantic and offset predictions, which satisfies the efficiency of the whole system. After the 3D instance segmentation, we post-process the segmented point cloud by removing outliers and projecting all points onto a top-view 2D map representation. The system integrates the information above and interacts with users intuitively by acoustic feedback. The proposed 3D instance segmentation model has achieved state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet v2 dataset. Comprehensive field tests with various tasks in a user study verify the usability and effectiveness of our system for assisting visually impaired people in holistic indoor understanding, obstacle avoidance and object search.
Transparent objects, such as glass walls and doors, constitute architectural obstacles hindering the mobility of people with low vision or blindness. For instance, the open space behind glass doors is inaccessible, unless it is correctly perceived and interacted with. However, traditional assistive technologies rarely cover the segmentation of these safety-critical transparent objects. In this paper, we build a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) perception model, which can segment general- and transparent objects. The two dense segmentation results are further combined with depth information in the system to help users navigate safely and assist them to negotiate transparent obstacles. We propose a lightweight Transformer Parsing Module (TPM) to perform multi-scale feature interpretation in the transformer-based decoder. Benefiting from TPM, the double decoders can perform joint learning from corresponding datasets to pursue robustness, meanwhile maintain efficiency on a portable GPU, with negligible calculation increase. The entire Trans4Trans model is constructed in a symmetrical encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the test sets of Stanford2D3D and Trans10K-v2 datasets, obtaining mIoU of 45.13% and 75.14%, respectively. Through a user study and various pre-tests conducted in indoor and outdoor scenes, the usability and reliability of our assistive system have been extensively verified. Meanwhile, the Tran4Trans model has outstanding performances on driving scene datasets. On Cityscapes, ACDC, and DADA-seg datasets corresponding to common environments, adverse weather, and traffic accident scenarios, mIoU scores of 81.5%, 76.3%, and 39.2% are obtained, demonstrating its high efficiency and robustness for real-world transportation applications.
Image segmentation is often ambiguous at the level of individual image patches and requires contextual information to reach label consensus. In this paper we introduce Segmenter, a transformer model for semantic segmentation. In contrast to convolution-based methods, our approach allows to model global context already at the first layer and throughout the network. We build on the recent Vision Transformer (ViT) and extend it to semantic segmentation. To do so, we rely on the output embeddings corresponding to image patches and obtain class labels from these embeddings with a point-wise linear decoder or a mask transformer decoder. We leverage models pre-trained for image classification and show that we can fine-tune them on moderate sized datasets available for semantic segmentation. The linear decoder allows to obtain excellent results already, but the performance can be further improved by a mask transformer generating class masks. We conduct an extensive ablation study to show the impact of the different parameters, in particular the performance is better for large models and small patch sizes. Segmenter attains excellent results for semantic segmentation. It outperforms the state of the art on both ADE20K and Pascal Context datasets and is competitive on Cityscapes.
Transformers have shown impressive performance in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks, due to the capability of modeling long-range dependencies. Recent progress has demonstrated to combine such transformers with CNN-based semantic image segmentation models is very promising. However, it is not well studied yet on how well a pure transformer based approach can achieve for image segmentation. In this work, we explore a novel framework for semantic image segmentation, which is encoder-decoder based Fully Transformer Networks (FTN). Specifically, we first propose a Pyramid Group Transformer (PGT) as the encoder for progressively learning hierarchical features, while reducing the computation complexity of the standard visual transformer(ViT). Then, we propose a Feature Pyramid Transformer (FPT) to fuse semantic-level and spatial-level information from multiple levels of the PGT encoder for semantic image segmentation. Surprisingly, this simple baseline can achieve new state-of-the-art results on multiple challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks, including PASCAL Context, ADE20K and COCO-Stuff. The source code will be released upon the publication of this work.
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