Johannes Meyer

Johannes Meyer

After the introduction of smartphones and smartwatches, AR glasses are considered the next breakthrough in the field of wearables. While the transition from smartphones to smartwatches was based mainly on established display technologies, the display technology of AR glasses presents a technological challenge. Many display technologies, such as retina projectors, are based on continuous adaptive control of the display based on the user's pupil position. Furthermore, head-mounted systems require an adaptation and extension of established interaction concepts to provide the user with an immersive experience. Eye-tracking is a crucial technology to help AR glasses achieve a breakthrough through optimized display technology and gaze-based interaction concepts. Available eye-tracking technologies, such as VOG, do not meet the requirements of AR glasses, especially regarding power consumption, robustness, and integrability. To further overcome these limitations and push mobile eye-tracking for AR glasses forward, novel laser-based eye-tracking sensor technologies are researched in this thesis. The thesis contributes to a significant scientific advancement towards energy-efficient mobile eye-tracking for AR glasses.

Johannes Meyer, Jasper Hoffmann, Felix Schulz et al.

Semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud data often comes with high annotation costs. Active learning automates the process of selecting which data to annotate, reducing the total amount of annotation needed to achieve satisfactory performance. Recent approaches to active learning for 3D point clouds are often based on sophisticated heuristics for both, splitting point clouds into annotatable regions and selecting the most beneficial for further neural network training. In this work, we propose a novel and easy-to-implement strategy to separate the point cloud into annotatable regions. In our approach, we utilize a 2D grid to subdivide the point cloud into columns. To identify the next data to be annotated, we employ a network ensemble to estimate the uncertainty in the network output. We evaluate our method on the S3DIS dataset, the Toronto-3D dataset, and a large-scale urban 3D point cloud of the city of Freiburg, which we labeled in parts manually. The extensive evaluation shows that our method yields performance on par with, or even better than, complex state-of-the-art methods on all datasets. Furthermore, we provide results suggesting that in the context of point clouds the annotated area can be a more meaningful measure for active learning algorithms than the number of annotated points.

Nicolai Dorka, Johannes Meyer, Wolfram Burgard

Real-time object detection in videos using lightweight hardware is a crucial component of many robotic tasks. Detectors using different modalities and with varying computational complexities offer different trade-offs. One option is to have a very lightweight model that can predict from all modalities at once for each frame. However, in some situations (e.g., in static scenes) it might be better to have a more complex but more accurate model and to extrapolate from previous predictions for the frames coming in at processing time. We formulate this task as a sequential decision making problem and use reinforcement learning (RL) to generate a policy that decides from the RGB input which detector out of a portfolio of different object detectors to take for the next prediction. The objective of the RL agent is to maximize the accuracy of the predictions per image. We evaluate the approach on the Waymo Open Dataset and show that it exceeds the performance of each single detector.

Ryan Sweke, Frederik Wilde, Johannes Meyer et al.

Within the context of hybrid quantum-classical optimization, gradient descent based optimizers typically require the evaluation of expectation values with respect to the outcome of parameterized quantum circuits. In this work, we explore the consequences of the prior observation that estimation of these quantities on quantum hardware results in a form of stochastic gradient descent optimization. We formalize this notion, which allows us to show that in many relevant cases, including VQE, QAOA and certain quantum classifiers, estimating expectation values with $k$ measurement outcomes results in optimization algorithms whose convergence properties can be rigorously well understood, for any value of $k$. In fact, even using single measurement outcomes for the estimation of expectation values is sufficient. Moreover, in many settings the required gradients can be expressed as linear combinations of expectation values -- originating, e.g., from a sum over local terms of a Hamiltonian, a parameter shift rule, or a sum over data-set instances -- and we show that in these cases $k$-shot expectation value estimation can be combined with sampling over terms of the linear combination, to obtain "doubly stochastic" gradient descent optimizers. For all algorithms we prove convergence guarantees, providing a framework for the derivation of rigorous optimization results in the context of near-term quantum devices. Additionally, we explore numerically these methods on benchmark VQE, QAOA and quantum-enhanced machine learning tasks and show that treating the stochastic settings as hyper-parameters allows for state-of-the-art results with significantly fewer circuit executions and measurements.