Mohamed Moustafa

Hesham M. Eraqi, Mohamed N. Moustafa, Jens Honer

Conditional imitation learning (CIL) trains deep neural networks, in an end-to-end manner, to mimic human driving. This approach has demonstrated suitable vehicle control when following roads, avoiding obstacles, or taking specific turns at intersections to reach a destination. Unfortunately, performance dramatically decreases when deployed to unseen environments and is inconsistent against varying weather conditions. Most importantly, the current CIL fails to avoid static road blockages. In this work, we propose a solution to those deficiencies. First, we fuse the laser scanner with the regular camera streams, at the features level, to overcome the generalization and consistency challenges. Second, we introduce a new efficient Occupancy Grid Mapping (OGM) method along with new algorithms for road blockages avoidance and global route planning. Consequently, our proposed method dynamically detects partial and full road blockages, and guides the controlled vehicle to another route to reach the destination. Following the original CIL work, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposal on CARLA simulator urban driving benchmark. Our experiments showed that our model improved consistency against weather conditions by four times and autonomous driving success rate generalization by 52%. Furthermore, our global route planner improved the driving success rate by 37%. Our proposed road blockages avoidance algorithm improved the driving success rate by 27%. Finally, the average kilometers traveled before a collision with a static object increased by 1.5 times. The main source code can be reached at https://heshameraqi.github.io/dynamic_cil_autonomous_driving.

Hussein Adly, Mohamed Moustafa

Texture classification is a problem that has various applications such as remote sensing and forest species recognition. Solutions tend to be custom fit to the dataset used but fails to generalize. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in combination with Support Vector Machine (SVM) form a robust selection between powerful invariant feature extractor and accurate classifier. The fusion of experts provides stability in classification rates among different datasets.

Yehya Abouelnaga, Ola S. Ali, Hager Rady et al.

In this paper, we study the performance of different classifiers on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and build an ensemble of classifiers to reach a better performance. We show that, on CIFAR-10, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), on some classes, are mutually exclusive, thus yield in higher accuracy when combined. We reduce KNN overfitting using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and ensemble it with a CNN to increase its accuracy. Our approach improves our best CNN model from 93.33% to 94.03%.

Hesham Eraqi, Youssef EmadEldin, Mohamed Moustafa

Collision avoidance systems can play a vital role in reducing the number of accidents and saving human lives. In this paper, we introduce and validate a novel method for vehicles reactive collision avoidance using evolutionary neural networks (ENN). A single front-facing rangefinder sensor is the only input required by our method. The training process and the proposed method analysis and validation are carried out using simulation. Extensive experiments are conducted to analyse the proposed method and evaluate its performance. Firstly, we experiment the ability to learn collision avoidance in a static free track. Secondly, we analyse the effect of the rangefinder sensor resolution on the learning process. Thirdly, we experiment the ability of a vehicle to individually and simultaneously learn collision avoidance. Finally, we test the generality of the proposed method. We used a more realistic and powerful simulation environment (CarMaker), a camera as an alternative input sensor, and lane keeping as an extra feature to learn. The results are encouraging; the proposed method successfully allows vehicles to learn collision avoidance in different scenarios that are unseen during training. It also generalizes well if any of the input sensor, the simulator, or the task to be learned is changed.

Eman Ahmed, Mohamed Moustafa

Most existing automatic house price estimation systems rely only on some textual data like its neighborhood area and the number of rooms. The final price is estimated by a human agent who visits the house and assesses it visually. In this paper, we propose extracting visual features from house photographs and combining them with the house's textual information. The combined features are fed to a fully connected multilayer Neural Network (NN) that estimates the house price as its single output. To train and evaluate our network, we have collected the first houses dataset (to our knowledge) that combines both images and textual attributes. The dataset is composed of 535 sample houses from the state of California, USA. Our experiments showed that adding the visual features increased the R-value by a factor of 3 and decreased the Mean Square Error (MSE) by one order of magnitude compared with textual-only features. Additionally, when trained on the benchmark textual-only features housing dataset, our proposed NN still outperformed the existing model published results.

Mohamed Moustafa

It is no secret that pornographic material is now a one-click-away from everyone, including children and minors. General social media networks are striving to isolate adult images and videos from normal ones. Intelligent image analysis methods can help to automatically detect and isolate questionable images in media. Unfortunately, these methods require vast experience to design the classifier including one or more of the popular computer vision feature descriptors. We propose to build a classifier based on one of the recently flourishing deep learning techniques. Convolutional neural networks contain many layers for both automatic features extraction and classification. The benefit is an easier system to build (no need for hand-crafting features and classifiers). Additionally, our experiments show that it is even more accurate than the state of the art methods on the most recent benchmark dataset.