Felix Ott

Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl, Thorsten Nowak et al.

Jamming devices disrupt signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and pose a significant threat, as they compromise the robustness of accurate positioning. The detection of anomalies within frequency snapshots is crucial to counteract these interferences effectively. A critical preliminary countermeasure involves the reliable classification of interferences and the characterization and localization of jamming devices. This paper introduces an extensive dataset comprising snapshots obtained from a low-frequency antenna that capture various generated interferences within a large-scale environment, including controlled multipath effects. Our objective is to assess the resilience of machine learning (ML) models against environmental changes, such as multipath effects, variations in interference attributes, such as interference class, bandwidth, and signal power, the accuracy of jamming device localization, and the constraints imposed by snapshot input lengths. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of a diverse set of 129 distinct vision encoder models across all tasks. By analyzing the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, we demonstrate the adaptability of our model in generalizing across diverse facets, thus establishing its suitability for real-world applications. Dataset: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/controlled_low_frequency

Felix Ott, Lucas Heublein, David Rügamer et al.

The localization of objects is a crucial task in various applications such as robotics, virtual and augmented reality, and the transportation of goods in warehouses. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled the localization using monocular visual cameras. While structure from motion (SfM) predicts the absolute pose from a point cloud, absolute pose regression (APR) methods learn a semantic understanding of the environment through neural networks. However, both fields face challenges caused by the environment such as motion blur, lighting changes, repetitive patterns, and feature-less structures. This study aims to address these challenges by incorporating additional information and regularizing the absolute pose using relative pose regression (RPR) methods. RPR methods suffer under different challenges, i.e., motion blur. The optical flow between consecutive images is computed using the Lucas-Kanade algorithm, and the relative pose is predicted using an auxiliary small recurrent convolutional network. The fusion of absolute and relative poses is a complex task due to the mismatch between the global and local coordinate systems. State-of-the-art methods fusing absolute and relative poses use pose graph optimization (PGO) to regularize the absolute pose predictions using relative poses. In this work, we propose recurrent fusion networks to optimally align absolute and relative pose predictions to improve the absolute pose prediction. We evaluate eight different recurrent units and construct a simulation environment to pre-train the APR and RPR networks for better generalized training. Additionally, we record a large database of different scenarios in a challenging large-scale indoor environment that mimics a warehouse with transportation robots. We conduct hyperparameter searches and experiments to show the effectiveness of our recurrent fusion method compared to PGO.

Felix Ott, David Rügamer, Lucas Heublein et al.

The performance of a machine learning model degrades when it is applied to data from a similar but different domain than the data it has initially been trained on. The goal of domain adaptation (DA) is to mitigate this domain shift problem by searching for an optimal feature transformation to learn a domain-invariant representation. Such a domain shift can appear in handwriting recognition (HWR) applications where the motion pattern of the hand and with that the motion pattern of the pen is different for writing on paper and on tablet. This becomes visible in the sensor data for online handwriting (OnHW) from pens with integrated inertial measurement units. This paper proposes a supervised DA approach to enhance learning for OnHW recognition between tablet and paper data. Our method exploits loss functions such as maximum mean discrepancy and correlation alignment to learn a domain-invariant feature representation (i.e., similar covariances between tablet and paper features). We use a triplet loss that takes negative samples of the auxiliary domain (i.e., paper samples) to increase the amount of samples of the tablet dataset. We conduct an evaluation on novel sequence-based OnHW datasets (i.e., words) and show an improvement on the paper domain with an early fusion strategy by using pairwise learning.

Nisha L. Raichur, Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl et al.

The primary objective of methods in continual learning is to learn tasks in a sequential manner over time (sometimes from a stream of data), while mitigating the detrimental phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting. This paper proposes a method to learn an effective representation between previous and newly encountered class prototypes. We propose a prototypical network with a Bayesian learning-driven contrastive loss (BLCL), tailored specifically for class-incremental learning scenarios. We introduce a contrastive loss that incorporates novel classes into the latent representation by reducing intra-class and increasing inter-class distance. Our approach dynamically adapts the balance between the cross-entropy and contrastive loss functions with a Bayesian learning technique. Experimental results conducted on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet100 datasets for image classification and images of a GNSS-based dataset for interference classification validate the efficacy of our method, showcasing its superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Git: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/gnss_class_incremental_learning

Felix Ott, Lucas Heublein, Nisha Lakshmana Raichur et al.

Jamming devices pose a significant threat by disrupting signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), compromising the robustness of accurate positioning. Detecting anomalies in frequency snapshots is crucial to counteract these interferences effectively. The ability to adapt to diverse, unseen interference characteristics is essential for ensuring the reliability of GNSS in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning (FSL) approach to adapt to new interference classes. Our method employs quadruplet selection for the model to learn representations using various positive and negative interference classes. Furthermore, our quadruplet variant selects pairs based on the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to differentiate between similar classes. We recorded a dataset at a motorway with eight interference classes on which our FSL method with quadruplet loss outperforms other FSL techniques in jammer classification accuracy with 97.66%. Dataset available at: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/FIOT_highway

Lucas Heublein, Nisha L. Raichur, Tobias Feigl et al.

The accuracy and reliability of vehicle localization on roads are crucial for applications such as self-driving cars, toll systems, and digital tachographs. To achieve accurate positioning, vehicles typically use global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers to validate their absolute positions. However, GNSS-based positioning can be compromised by interference signals, necessitating the identification, classification, determination of purpose, and localization of such interference to mitigate or eliminate it. Recent approaches based on machine learning (ML) have shown superior performance in monitoring interference. However, their feasibility in real-world applications and environments has yet to be assessed. Effective implementation of ML techniques requires training datasets that incorporate realistic interference signals, including real-world noise and potential multipath effects that may occur between transmitter, receiver, and satellite in the operational area. Additionally, these datasets require reference labels. Creating such datasets is often challenging due to legal restrictions, as causing interference to GNSS sources is strictly prohibited. Consequently, the performance of ML-based methods in practical applications remains unclear. To address this gap, we describe a series of large-scale measurement campaigns conducted in real-world settings at two highway locations in Germany and the Seetal Alps in Austria, and in large-scale controlled indoor environments. We evaluate the latest supervised ML-based methods to report on their performance in real-world settings and present the applicability of pseudo-labeling for unsupervised learning. We demonstrate the challenges of combining datasets due to data discrepancies and evaluate outlier detection, domain adaptation, and data augmentation techniques to present the models' capabilities to adapt to changes in the datasets.

Harshith Manjunath, Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are advanced AI systems applied across various domains, including NLP, information retrieval, and recommendation systems. Despite their adaptability and efficiency, LLMs have not been extensively explored for signal processing tasks, particularly in the domain of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) interference monitoring. GNSS interference monitoring is essential to ensure the reliability of vehicle localization on roads, a critical requirement for numerous applications. However, GNSS-based positioning is vulnerable to interference from jamming devices, which can compromise its accuracy. The primary objective is to identify, classify, and mitigate these interferences. Interpreting GNSS snapshots and the associated interferences presents significant challenges due to the inherent complexity, including multipath effects, diverse interference types, varying sensor characteristics, and satellite constellations. In this paper, we extract features from a large GNSS dataset and employ LLaVA to retrieve relevant information from an extensive knowledge base. We employ prompt engineering to interpret the interferences and environmental factors, and utilize t-SNE to analyze the feature embeddings. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of visual and logical reasoning within the GNSS context. Furthermore, our pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning models in interference classification tasks.

Nishant S. Gaikwad, Lucas Heublein, Nisha L. Raichur et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple devices to collaboratively train a global model while maintaining data on local servers. Each device trains the model on its local server and shares only the model updates (i.e., gradient weights) during the aggregation step. A significant challenge in FL is managing the feature distribution of novel and unbalanced data across devices. In this paper, we propose an FL approach using few-shot learning and aggregation of the model weights on a global server. We introduce a dynamic early stopping method to balance out-of-distribution classes based on representation learning, specifically utilizing the maximum mean discrepancy of feature embeddings between local and global models. An exemplary application of FL is to orchestrate machine learning models along highways for interference classification based on snapshots from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. Extensive experiments on four GNSS datasets from two real-world highways and controlled environments demonstrate that our FL method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques in adapting to both novel interference classes and multipath scenarios.

Lucas Heublein, Simon Kocher, Tobias Feigl et al.

Distributed learning and Edge AI necessitate efficient data processing, low-latency communication, decentralized model training, and stringent data privacy to facilitate real-time intelligence on edge devices while reducing dependency on centralized infrastructure and ensuring high model performance. In the context of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) applications, the primary objective is to accurately monitor and classify interferences that degrade system performance in distributed environments, thereby enhancing situational awareness. To achieve this, machine learning (ML) models can be deployed on low-resource devices, ensuring minimal communication latency and preserving data privacy. The key challenge is to compress ML models while maintaining high classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose variational autoencoders (VAEs) for disentanglement to extract essential latent features that enable accurate classification of interferences. We demonstrate that the disentanglement approach can be leveraged for both data compression and data augmentation by interpolating the lower-dimensional latent representations of signal power. To validate our approach, we evaluate three VAE variants - vanilla, factorized, and conditional generative - on four distinct datasets, including two collected in controlled indoor environments and two real-world highway datasets. Additionally, we conduct extensive hyperparameter searches to optimize performance. Our proposed VAE achieves a data compression rate ranging from 512 to 8,192 and achieves an accuracy up to 99.92%.

Lucas Heublein, Thorsten Nowak, Tobias Feigl et al.

Jamming devices disrupt signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and pose a significant threat by compromising the reliability of accurate positioning. Consequently, the detection and localization of these interference signals are essential to achieve situational awareness, mitigating their impact, and implementing effective countermeasures. In this paper, we utilize a two-times-two patch antenna system (i.e., the software defined radio device Ettus USRP X440) to predict the angle, elevation, and distance to the jamming source based on in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples. We propose to use an inertial measurement unit (IMU) attached to the antenna system to predict the relative movement of the antenna in dynamic scenarios. We present a synthetic aperture system that enables coherent spatial imaging using platform motion to synthesize larger virtual apertures, offering superior angular resolution without mechanically rotating antennas. While classical angle-of-arrival (AoA) methods exhibit reduced accuracy in multipath environments due to signal reflections and scattering, leading to localization errors, we utilize a methodology that fuses IQ and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-computed spectrograms with 22 AoA features and the predicted relative movement to enhance GNSS jammer direction finding.

Lucas Heublein, Christian Wielenberg, Thorsten Nowak et al.

Jamming devices disrupt signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and pose a significant threat by compromising the reliability of accurate positioning. Consequently, the detection and localization of these interference signals are essential to achieve situational awareness, mitigating their impact, and implementing effective counter-measures. Classical Angle of Arrival (AoA) methods exhibit reduced accuracy in multipath environments due to signal reflections and scattering, leading to localization errors. Additionally, AoA-based techniques demand substantial computational resources for array signal processing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting and classifying interference while estimating the distance, azimuth, and elevation of jamming sources. Our benchmark study evaluates 128 vision encoder and time-series models to identify the highest-performing methods for each task. We introduce an attention-based fusion framework that integrates in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-computed spectrograms while incorporating 22 AoA features to enhance localization accuracy. Furthermore, we present a novel dataset of moving jamming devices recorded in an indoor environment with dynamic multipath conditions and demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Felix Ott, David Rügamer, Lucas Heublein et al.

Cross-modal representation learning learns a shared embedding between two or more modalities to improve performance in a given task compared to using only one of the modalities. Cross-modal representation learning from different data types -- such as images and time-series data (e.g., audio or text data) -- requires a deep metric learning loss that minimizes the distance between the modality embeddings. In this paper, we propose to use the contrastive or triplet loss, which uses positive and negative identities to create sample pairs with different labels, for cross-modal representation learning between image and time-series modalities (CMR-IS). By adapting the triplet loss for cross-modal representation learning, higher accuracy in the main (time-series classification) task can be achieved by exploiting additional information of the auxiliary (image classification) task. We present a triplet loss with a dynamic margin for single label and sequence-to-sequence classification tasks. We perform extensive evaluations on synthetic image and time-series data, and on data for offline handwriting recognition (HWR) and on online HWR from sensor-enhanced pens for classifying written words. Our experiments show an improved classification accuracy, faster convergence, and better generalizability due to an improved cross-modal representation. Furthermore, the more suitable generalizability leads to a better adaptability between writers for online HWR.

Felix Ott, Tobias Feigl, Christoffer Löffler et al.

Visual Odometry (VO) accumulates a positional drift in long-term robot navigation tasks. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) improve VO in various aspects, VO still suffers from moving obstacles, discontinuous observation of features, and poor textures or visual information. While recent approaches estimate a 6DoF pose either directly from (a series of) images or by merging depth maps with optical flow (OF), research that combines absolute pose regression with OF is limited. We propose ViPR, a novel modular architecture for long-term 6DoF VO that leverages temporal information and synergies between absolute pose estimates (from PoseNet-like modules) and relative pose estimates (from FlowNet-based modules) by combining both through recurrent layers. Experiments on known datasets and on our own Industry dataset show that our modular design outperforms state of the art in long-term navigation tasks.