Klaus Friedrichs

Sadia Ilyas, Annika Mütze, Klaus Friedrichs et al.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is an important yet underexplored task. A reliable object detector should be able to handle OOD objects by localizing and correctly classifying them as OOD. However, a critical issue arises when such atypical objects are completely missed by the object detector and incorrectly treated as background. Existing OOD detection approaches in object detection often rely on complex architectures or auxiliary branches and typically do not provide a framework that treats in-distribution (ID) and OOD in a unified way. In this work, we address these limitations by enabling a single detector to detect OOD objects, that are otherwise silently overlooked, alongside ID objects. We present \textbf{SynOE-OD}, a \textbf{Syn}thetic \textbf{O}utlier-\textbf{E}xposure-based \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etection framework, that leverages strong generative models, like Stable Diffusion, and Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors (OVODs) to generate semantically meaningful, object-level data that serve as outliers during training. The generated data is used for transfer-learning to establish strong ID task performance and supplement detection models with OOD object detection robustness. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art average precision on an established OOD object detection benchmark, where OVODs, such as GroundingDINO, show limited zero-shot performance in detecting OOD objects in street-scenes.

Daniel Busch, Christian Bohn, Thomas Kurbiel et al.

Dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) semantic maps are central to autonomous driving, yet current multi-camera methods depend on costly, inconsistently annotated BEV ground truth. We address this limitation with a two-phase training strategy for fine-grained road marking segmentation that removes full supervision during pretraining and halves the amount of training data during fine-tuning while still outperforming the comparable supervised baseline model. During the self-supervised pretraining, BEVFormer predictions are differentiably reprojected into the image plane and trained against multi-view semantic pseudo-labels generated by the widely used semantic segmentation model Mask2Former. A temporal loss encourages consistency across frames. The subsequent supervised fine-tuning phase requires only 50% of the dataset and significantly less training time. With our method, the fine-tuning benefits from rich priors learned during pretraining boosting the performance and BEV segmentation quality (up to +2.5pp mIoU over the fully supervised baseline) on nuScenes. It simultaneously halves the usage of annotation data and reduces total training time by up to two thirds. The results demonstrate that differentiable reprojection plus camera perspective pseudo labels yields transferable BEV features and a scalable path toward reduced-label autonomous perception.

Christian Bohn, Thomas Kurbiel, Klaus Friedrichs et al.

In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared to single-task models, its Multi-Head-Attention often approaches the limits of what is computationally feasible considering practical hardware limitations. This is due to the fact that the size of the attention matrix scales quadratically with the number of tasks (assuming roughly equal numbers of queries for all tasks). As a solution, we propose our novel Deformable Inter-Task Self-Attention for Multitask models that enables the much more efficient aggregation of information across the feature maps from different tasks. In our experiments on the NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context datasets, we demonstrate an order-of-magnitude reduction in both FLOPs count and inference latency. At the same time, we also achieve substantial improvements by up to 7.4% in the individual tasks' prediction quality metrics.

Claudia Drygala, Matthias Rottmann, Hanno Gottschalk et al.

To ensure safety in automated driving, the correct perception of the situation inside the car is as important as its environment. Thus, seat occupancy detection and classification of detected instances play an important role in interior sensing. By the knowledge of the seat occupancy status, it is possible to, e.g., automate the airbag deployment control. Furthermore, the presence of a driver, which is necessary for partially automated driving cars at the automation levels two to four can be verified. In this work, we compare different statistical methods from the field of image segmentation to approach the problem of background-foreground segmentation in camera based interior sensing. In the recent years, several methods based on different techniques have been developed and applied to images or videos from different applications. The peculiarity of the given scenarios of interior sensing is, that the foreground instances and the background both contain static as well as dynamic elements. In data considered in this work, even the camera position is not completely fixed. We review and benchmark three different methods ranging, i.e., Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), Morphological Snakes and a deep neural network, namely a Mask R-CNN. In particular, the limitations of the classical methods, GMM and Morphological Snakes, for interior sensing are shown. Furthermore, it turns, that it is possible to overcome these limitations by deep learning, e.g.\ using a Mask R-CNN. Although only a small amount of ground truth data was available for training, we enabled the Mask R-CNN to produce high quality background-foreground masks via transfer learning. Moreover, we demonstrate that certain augmentation as well as pre- and post-processing methods further enhance the performance of the investigated methods.

Lukas Hahn, Lutz Roese-Koerner, Klaus Friedrichs et al.

The performance of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) depends on its hyperparameters, like the number of layers, kernel sizes, or the learning rate for example. Especially in smaller networks and applications with limited computational resources, optimisation is key. We present a fast and efficient approach for CNN architecture selection. Taking into account time consumption, precision and robustness, we develop a heuristic to quickly and reliably assess a network's performance. In combination with Bayesian optimisation (BO), to effectively cover the vast parameter space, our contribution offers a plain and powerful architecture search for this machine learning technique.