Zaid A. El-Shair

Zaid A. El-Shair, Abdalmalek Abu-raddaha, Aaron Cofield et al.

Robust perception is critical for autonomous driving, especially under adverse weather and lighting conditions that commonly occur in real-world environments. In this paper, we introduce the Stereo Image Dataset (SID), a large-scale stereo-image dataset that captures a wide spectrum of challenging real-world environmental scenarios. Recorded at a rate of 20 Hz using a ZED stereo camera mounted on a vehicle, SID consists of 27 sequences totaling over 178k stereo image pairs that showcase conditions from clear skies to heavy snow, captured during the day, dusk, and night. The dataset includes detailed sequence-level annotations for weather conditions, time of day, location, and road conditions, along with instances of camera lens soiling, offering a realistic representation of the challenges in autonomous navigation. Our work aims to address a notable gap in research for autonomous driving systems by presenting high-fidelity stereo images essential for the development and testing of advanced perception algorithms. These algorithms support consistent and reliable operation across variable weather and lighting conditions, even when handling challenging situations like lens soiling. SID is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.7302/esz6-nv83.

Zaid El-Shair, Samir Rawashdeh

Event-based vision has been rapidly growing in recent years justified by the unique characteristics it presents such as its high temporal resolutions (~1us), high dynamic range (>120dB), and output latency of only a few microseconds. This work further explores a hybrid, multi-modal, approach for object detection and tracking that leverages state-of-the-art frame-based detectors complemented by hand-crafted event-based methods to improve the overall tracking performance with minimal computational overhead. The methods presented include event-based bounding box (BB) refinement that improves the precision of the resulting BBs, as well as a continuous event-based object detection method, to recover missed detections and generate inter-frame detections that enable a high-temporal-resolution tracking output. The advantages of these methods are quantitatively verified by an ablation study using the higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) metric. Results show significant performance gains resembled by an improvement in the HOTA from 56.6%, using only frames, to 64.1% and 64.9%, for the event and edge-based mask configurations combined with the two methods proposed, at the baseline framerate of 24Hz. Likewise, incorporating these methods with the same configurations has improved HOTA from 52.5% to 63.1%, and from 51.3% to 60.2% at the high-temporal-resolution tracking rate of 384Hz. Finally, a validation experiment is conducted to analyze the real-world single-object tracking performance using high-speed LiDAR. Empirical evidence shows that our approaches provide significant advantages compared to using frame-based object detectors at the baseline framerate of 24Hz and higher tracking rates of up to 500Hz.

Zaid A. El Shair, Samir A. Rawashdeh

In this data article, we introduce the Multi-Modal Event-based Vehicle Detection and Tracking (MEVDT) dataset. This dataset provides a synchronized stream of event data and grayscale images of traffic scenes, captured using the Dynamic and Active-Pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) 240c hybrid event-based camera. MEVDT comprises 63 multi-modal sequences with approximately 13k images, 5M events, 10k object labels, and 85 unique object tracking trajectories. Additionally, MEVDT includes manually annotated ground truth labels $\unicode{x2014}$ consisting of object classifications, pixel-precise bounding boxes, and unique object IDs $\unicode{x2014}$ which are provided at a labeling frequency of 24 Hz. Designed to advance the research in the domain of event-based vision, MEVDT aims to address the critical need for high-quality, real-world annotated datasets that enable the development and evaluation of object detection and tracking algorithms in automotive environments.

Ali Hassani, Zaid El Shair, Rafi Ud Duala Refat et al.

This paper demonstrates a novel approach to improve face-recognition pose-invariance using semantic-segmentation features. The proposed Seg-Distilled-ID network jointly learns identification and semantic-segmentation tasks, where the segmentation task is then "distilled" (MobileNet encoder). Performance is benchmarked against three state-of-the-art encoders on a publicly available data-set emphasizing head-pose variations. Experimental evaluations show the Seg-Distilled-ID network shows notable robustness benefits, achieving 99.9% test-accuracy in comparison to 81.6% on ResNet-101, 96.1% on VGG-19 and 96.3% on InceptionV3. This is achieved using approximately one-tenth of the top encoder's inference parameters. These results demonstrate distilling semantic-segmentation features can efficiently address face-recognition pose-invariance.