George Adaimi

George Adaimi, Sven Kreiss, Alexandre Alahi

Drones or UAVs, equipped with different sensors, have been deployed in many places especially for urban traffic monitoring or last-mile delivery. It provides the ability to control the different aspects of traffic given real-time obeservations, an important pillar for the future of transportation and smart cities. With the increasing use of such machines, many previous state-of-the-art object detectors, who have achieved high performance on front facing cameras, are being used on UAV datasets. When applied to high-resolution aerial images captured from such datasets, they fail to generalize to the wide range of objects' scales. In order to address this limitation, we propose an object detection method called Butterfly Detector that is tailored to detect objects in aerial images. We extend the concept of fields and introduce butterfly fields, a type of composite field that describes the spatial information of output features as well as the scale of the detected object. To overcome occlusion and viewing angle variations that can hinder the localization process, we employ a voting mechanism between related butterfly vectors pointing to the object center. We evaluate our Butterfly Detector on two publicly available UAV datasets (UAVDT and VisDrone2019) and show that it outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods while remaining real-time.

George Adaimi, Sven Kreiss, Alexandre Alahi

Transportation systems often rely on understanding the flow of vehicles or pedestrian. From traffic monitoring at the city scale, to commuters in train terminals, recent progress in sensing technology make it possible to use cameras to better understand the demand, i.e., better track moving agents (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians). Whether the cameras are mounted on drones, vehicles, or fixed in the built environments, they inevitably remain scatter. We need to develop the technology to re-identify the same agents across images captured from non-overlapping field-of-views, referred to as the visual re-identification task. State-of-the-art methods learn a neural network based representation trained with the cross-entropy loss function. We argue that such loss function is not suited for the visual re-identification task hence propose to model confidence in the representation learning framework. We show the impact of our confidence-based learning framework with three methods: label smoothing, confidence penalty, and deep variational information bottleneck. They all show a boost in performance validating our claim. Our contribution is generic to any agent of interest, i.e., vehicles or pedestrians, and outperform highly specialized state-of-the-art methods across 5 datasets. The source code and models are shared towards an open science mission.