Sangwon Hwang

Sungmin Woo, Dogyoon Lee, Sangwon Hwang et al.

Despite the remarkable success of deep learning, an optimal convolution operation on point clouds remains elusive owing to their irregular data structure. Existing methods mainly focus on designing an effective continuous kernel function that can handle an arbitrary point in continuous space. Various approaches exhibiting high performance have been proposed, but we observe that the standard pointwise feature is represented by 1D channels and can become more informative when its representation involves additional spatial feature dimensions. In this paper, we present Multidimensional Kernel Convolution (MKConv), a novel convolution operator that learns to transform the point feature representation from a vector to a multidimensional matrix. Unlike standard point convolution, MKConv proceeds via two steps. (i) It first activates the spatial dimensions of local feature representation by exploiting multidimensional kernel weights. These spatially expanded features can represent their embedded information through spatial correlation as well as channel correlation in feature space, carrying more detailed local structure information. (ii) Then, discrete convolutions are applied to the multidimensional features which can be regarded as a grid-structured matrix. In this way, we can utilize the discrete convolutions for point cloud data without voxelization that suffers from information loss. Furthermore, we propose a spatial attention module, Multidimensional Local Attention (MLA), to provide comprehensive structure awareness within the local point set by reweighting the spatial feature dimensions. We demonstrate that MKConv has excellent applicability to point cloud processing tasks including object classification, object part segmentation, and scene semantic segmentation with superior results.

Minhyeok Lee, Sangwon Hwang, Chaewon Park et al.

Monocular depth estimation is an especially important task in robotics and autonomous driving, where 3D structural information is essential. However, extreme lighting conditions and complex surface objects make it difficult to predict depth in a single image. Therefore, to generate accurate depth maps, it is important for the model to learn structural information about the scene. We propose a novel Patch-Wise EdgeConv Module (PEM) and EdgeConv Attention Module (EAM) to solve the difficulty of monocular depth estimation. The proposed modules extract structural information by learning the relationship between image patches close to each other in space using edge convolution. Our method is evaluated on two popular datasets, the NYU Depth V2 and the KITTI Eigen split, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We prove that the proposed model predicts depth robustly in challenging scenes through various comparative experiments.

Minhyeok Lee, Junhyeop Lee, Dogyoon Lee et al.

The image-based lane detection algorithm is one of the key technologies in autonomous vehicles. Modern deep learning methods achieve high performance in lane detection, but it is still difficult to accurately detect lanes in challenging situations such as congested roads and extreme lighting conditions. To be robust on these challenging situations, it is important to extract global contextual information even from limited visual cues. In this paper, we propose a simple but powerful self-attention mechanism optimized for lane detection called the Expanded Self Attention (ESA) module. Inspired by the simple geometric structure of lanes, the proposed method predicts the confidence of a lane along the vertical and horizontal directions in an image. The prediction of the confidence enables estimating occluded locations by extracting global contextual information. ESA module can be easily implemented and applied to any encoder-decoder-based model without increasing the inference time. The performance of our method is evaluated on three popular lane detection benchmarks (TuSimple, CULane and BDD100K). We achieve state-of-the-art performance in CULane and BDD100K and distinct improvement on TuSimple dataset. The experimental results show that our approach is robust to occlusion and extreme lighting conditions.

Sungmin Woo, Sangwon Hwang, Woojin Kim et al.

Recently, researchers have been leveraging LiDAR point cloud for higher accuracy in 3D vehicle detection. Most state-of-the-art methods are deep learning based, but are easily affected by the number of points generated on the object. This vulnerability leads to numerous false positive boxes at high recall positions, where objects are occasionally predicted with few points. To address the issue, we introduce Penetrated Point Classifier (PPC) based on the underlying property of LiDAR that points cannot be generated behind vehicles. It determines whether a point exists behind the vehicle of the predicted box, and if does, the box is distinguished as false positive. Our straightforward yet unprecedented approach is evaluated on KITTI dataset and achieved performance improvement of PointRCNN, one of the state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results show that precision at the highest recall position is dramatically increased by 15.46 percentage points and 14.63 percentage points on the moderate and hard difficulty of car class, respectively.

Joosung Lee, Sangwon Hwang, Kyungjae Lee et al.

Visual odometry is an essential key for a localization module in SLAM systems. However, previous methods require tuning the system to adapt environment changes. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach for frame-to-frame monocular visual odometry estimation. The proposed network is only learned by disparity maps for not only covering the environment changes but also solving the scale problem. Furthermore, attention block and skip-ordering scheme are introduced to achieve robust performance in various driving environment. Our network is compared with the conventional methods which use common domain such as color or optical flow. Experimental results confirm that the proposed network shows better performance than other approaches with higher and more stable results.

Jeonghyeon Jang, Hoon Lee, Sangwon Hwang et al.

We study a deep learning (DL) based limited feedback methods for multi-antenna systems. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are introduced to replace an end-to-end limited feedback procedure including pilot-aided channel training process, channel codebook design, and beamforming vector selection. The DNNs are trained to yield binary feedback information as well as an efficient beamforming vector which maximizes the effective channel gain. Compared to conventional limited feedback schemes, the proposed DL method shows an 1 dB symbol error rate (SER) gain with reduced computational complexity.