José C. Riquelme

Manuel Carranza-García, Pedro Lara-Benítez, Jorge García-Gutiérrez et al.

Object detection has been one of the most active topics in computer vision for the past years. Recent works have mainly focused on pushing the state-of-the-art in the general-purpose COCO benchmark. However, the use of such detection frameworks in specific applications such as autonomous driving is yet an area to be addressed. This study presents an enhanced 2D object detector based on Faster R-CNN that is better suited for the context of autonomous vehicles. Two main aspects are improved: the anchor generation procedure and the performance drop in minority classes. The default uniform anchor configuration is not suitable in this scenario due to the perspective projection of the vehicle cameras. Therefore, we propose a perspective-aware methodology that divides the image into key regions via clustering and uses evolutionary algorithms to optimize the base anchors for each of them. Furthermore, we add a module that enhances the precision of the second-stage header network by including the spatial information of the candidate regions proposed in the first stage. We also explore different re-weighting strategies to address the foreground-foreground class imbalance, showing that the use of a reduced version of focal loss can significantly improve the detection of difficult and underrepresented objects in two-stage detectors. Finally, we design an ensemble model to combine the strengths of the different learning strategies. Our proposal is evaluated with the Waymo Open Dataset, which is the most extensive and diverse up to date. The results demonstrate an average accuracy improvement of 6.13% mAP when using the best single model, and of 9.69% mAP with the ensemble. The proposed modifications over the Faster R-CNN do not increase computational cost and can easily be extended to optimize other anchor-based detection frameworks.

Pedro Lara-Benítez, Manuel Carranza-García, Francisco Martínez-Álvarez et al.

Processing data streams arriving at high speed requires the development of models that can provide fast and accurate predictions. Although deep neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many machine learning tasks, their performance in real-time data streaming scenarios is a research area that has not yet been fully addressed. Nevertheless, there have been recent efforts to adapt complex deep learning models for streaming tasks by reducing their processing rate. The design of the asynchronous dual-pipeline deep learning framework allows to predict over incoming instances and update the model simultaneously using two separate layers. The aim of this work is to assess the performance of different types of deep architectures for data streaming classification using this framework. We evaluate models such as multi-layer perceptrons, recurrent, convolutional and temporal convolutional neural networks over several time-series datasets that are simulated as streams. The obtained results indicate that convolutional architectures achieve a higher performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency.