Yu Yao

Yaosen Chen, Yu Yao, Zhiqiang Li et al.

Talking face generation has a wide range of potential applications in the field of virtual digital humans. However, rendering high-fidelity facial video while ensuring lip synchronization is still a challenge for existing audio-driven talking face generation approaches. To address this issue, we propose HyperLips, a two-stage framework consisting of a hypernetwork for controlling lips and a high-resolution decoder for rendering high-fidelity faces. In the first stage, we construct a base face generation network that uses the hypernetwork to control the encoding latent code of the visual face information over audio. First, FaceEncoder is used to obtain latent code by extracting features from the visual face information taken from the video source containing the face frame.Then, HyperConv, which weighting parameters are updated by HyperNet with the audio features as input, will modify the latent code to synchronize the lip movement with the audio. Finally, FaceDecoder will decode the modified and synchronized latent code into visual face content. In the second stage, we obtain higher quality face videos through a high-resolution decoder. To further improve the quality of face generation, we trained a high-resolution decoder, HRDecoder, using face images and detected sketches generated from the first stage as input.Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art work with more realistic, high-fidelity, and lip synchronization. Project page: https://semchan.github.io/HyperLips Project/

Yuheng Liang, Zheyu Wang, Feng Liu et al.

Continuous Emotion Recognition (CER) plays a crucial role in intelligent human-computer interaction, mental health monitoring, and autonomous driving. Emotion modeling based on the Valence-Arousal (VA) space enables a more nuanced representation of emotional states. However, existing methods still face challenges in handling long-term dependencies and capturing complex temporal dynamics. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel emotion recognition model, Mamba-VA, which leverages the Mamba architecture to efficiently model sequential emotional variations in video frames. First, the model employs a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to extract deep visual features from video frames, enhancing the robustness of temporal information. Then, a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is utilized for temporal modeling to capture local temporal dependencies. Subsequently, Mamba is applied for long-sequence modeling, enabling the learning of global emotional trends. Finally, a fully connected (FC) layer performs regression analysis to predict continuous valence and arousal values. Experimental results on the Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation task of the 8th competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) demonstrate that the proposed model achieves valence and arousal scores of 0.5362 (0.5036) and 0.4310 (0.4119) on the validation (test) set, respectively, outperforming the baseline. The source code is available on GitHub:https://github.com/FreedomPuppy77/Charon.

Yu Yao, Ella Atkins, Matthew Johnson Roberson et al.

Accurate prediction of pedestrian crossing behaviors by autonomous vehicles can significantly improve traffic safety. Existing approaches often model pedestrian behaviors using trajectories or poses but do not offer a deeper semantic interpretation of a person's actions or how actions influence a pedestrian's intention to cross in the future. In this work, we follow the neuroscience and psychological literature to define pedestrian crossing behavior as a combination of an unobserved inner will (a probabilistic representation of binary intent of crossing vs. not crossing) and a set of multi-class actions (e.g., walking, standing, etc.). Intent generates actions, and the future actions in turn reflect the intent. We present a novel multi-task network that predicts future pedestrian actions and uses predicted future action as a prior to detect the present intent and action of the pedestrian. We also designed an attention relation network to incorporate external environmental contexts thus further improve intent and action detection performance. We evaluated our approach on two naturalistic driving datasets, PIE and JAAD, and extensive experiments show significantly improved and more explainable results for both intent detection and action prediction over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umautobots/pedestrian_intent_action_detection.

Yu Yao, Xizi Wang, Mingze Xu et al.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) has been extensively studied. However, research on egocentric traffic videos with dynamic scenes lacks large-scale benchmark datasets as well as effective evaluation metrics. This paper proposes traffic anomaly detection with a \textit{when-where-what} pipeline to detect, localize, and recognize anomalous events from egocentric videos. We introduce a new dataset called Detection of Traffic Anomaly (DoTA) containing 4,677 videos with temporal, spatial, and categorical annotations. A new spatial-temporal area under curve (STAUC) evaluation metric is proposed and used with DoTA. State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked for two VAD-related tasks.Experimental results show STAUC is an effective VAD metric. To our knowledge, DoTA is the largest traffic anomaly dataset to-date and is the first supporting traffic anomaly studies across when-where-what perspectives. Our code and dataset can be found in: https://github.com/MoonBlvd/Detection-of-Traffic-Anomaly

Yu Yao, Ella Atkins, Matthew Johnson-Roberson et al.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an essential task in robotic applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. State-of-the-art trajectory predictors use a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to encode observed trajectories and decode multi-modal future trajectories. This process can suffer from accumulated errors over long prediction horizons (>=2 seconds). This paper presents BiTraP, a goal-conditioned bi-directional multi-modal trajectory prediction method based on the CVAE. BiTraP estimates the goal (end-point) of trajectories and introduces a novel bi-directional decoder to improve longer-term trajectory prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that BiTraP generalizes to both first-person view (FPV) and bird's-eye view (BEV) scenarios and outperforms state-of-the-art results by ~10-50%. We also show that different choices of non-parametric versus parametric target models in the CVAE directly influence the predicted multi-modal trajectory distributions. These results provide guidance on trajectory predictor design for robotic applications such as collision avoidance and navigation systems.

Jeremy Castagno, Yu Yao, Ella Atkins

Safe autonomous landing in urban cities is a necessity for the growing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) industry. In urgent situations, building rooftops, particularly flat rooftops, can provide local safe landing zones for small UAS. This paper investigates the real-time identification and selection of safe landing zones on rooftops based on LiDAR and camera sensor feedback. A visual high fidelity simulated city is constructed in the Unreal game engine, with particular attention paid to accurately generating rooftops and the common obstructions found thereon, e.g., ac units, water towers, air vents. AirSim, a robotic simulator plugin for Unreal, offers drone simulation and control and is capable of outputting video and LiDAR sensor data streams from the simulated Unreal world. A neural network is trained on randomized simulated cities to provide a pixel classification model. A novel algorithm is presented which finds the optimum obstacle-free landing position on nearby rooftops by fusing LiDAR and vision data.

Yu Yao, Mingze Xu, Yuchen Wang et al.

Recognizing abnormal events such as traffic violations and accidents in natural driving scenes is essential for successful autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. However, most work on video anomaly detection suffers from two crucial drawbacks. First, they assume cameras are fixed and videos have static backgrounds, which is reasonable for surveillance applications but not for vehicle-mounted cameras. Second, they pose the problem as one-class classification, relying on arduously hand-labeled training datasets that limit recognition to anomaly categories that have been explicitly trained. This paper proposes an unsupervised approach for traffic accident detection in first-person (dashboard-mounted camera) videos. Our major novelty is to detect anomalies by predicting the future locations of traffic participants and then monitoring the prediction accuracy and consistency metrics with three different strategies. We evaluate our approach using a new dataset of diverse traffic accidents, AnAn Accident Detection (A3D), as well as another publicly-available dataset. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art.