K. S. Venkatesh

Hitika Tiwari, Min-Hung Chen, Yi-Min Tsai et al.

Despite the recent developments in 3D Face Reconstruction from occluded and noisy face images, the performance is still unsatisfactory. Moreover, most existing methods rely on additional dependencies, posing numerous constraints over the training procedure. Therefore, we propose a Self-Supervised RObustifying GUidancE (ROGUE) framework to obtain robustness against occlusions and noise in the face images. The proposed network contains 1) the Guidance Pipeline to obtain the 3D face coefficients for the clean faces and 2) the Robustification Pipeline to acquire the consistency between the estimated coefficients for occluded or noisy images and the clean counterpart. The proposed image- and feature-level loss functions aid the ROGUE learning process without posing additional dependencies. To facilitate model evaluation, we propose two challenging occlusion face datasets, ReaChOcc and SynChOcc, containing real-world and synthetic occlusion-based face images for robustness evaluation. Also, a noisy variant of the test dataset of CelebA is produced for evaluation. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by large margins (e.g., for the perceptual errors, a reduction of 23.8% for real-world occlusions, 26.4% for synthetic occlusions, and 22.7% for noisy images), demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The occlusion datasets and the corresponding evaluation code are released publicly at https://github.com/ArcTrinity9/Datasets-ReaChOcc-and-SynChOcc.

Swagat Kumar, Anima Majumder, Samrat Dutta et al.

In this paper, we provide details of a robotic system that can automate the task of picking and stowing objects from and to a rack in an e-commerce fulfillment warehouse. The system primarily comprises of four main modules: (1) Perception module responsible for recognizing query objects and localizing them in the 3-dimensional robot workspace; (2) Planning module generates necessary paths that the robot end- effector has to take for reaching the objects in the rack or in the tote; (3) Calibration module that defines the physical workspace for the robot visible through the on-board vision system; and (4) Gripping and suction system for picking and stowing different kinds of objects. The perception module uses a faster region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) to recognize objects. We designed a novel two finger gripper that incorporates pneumatic valve based suction effect to enhance its ability to pick different kinds of objects. The system was developed by IITK-TCS team for participation in the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 event. The team secured a fifth place in the stowing task in the event. The purpose of this article is to share our experiences with students and practicing engineers and enable them to build similar systems. The overall efficacy of the system is demonstrated through several simulation as well as real-world experiments with actual robots.

Ankan Bansal, K. S. Venkatesh

We present a method of estimating the number of people in high density crowds from still images. The method estimates counts by fusing information from multiple sources. Most of the existing work on crowd counting deals with very small crowds (tens of individuals) and use temporal information from videos. Our method uses only still images to estimate the counts in high density images (hundreds to thousands of individuals). At this scale, we cannot rely on only one set of features for count estimation. We, therefore, use multiple sources, viz. interest points (SIFT), Fourier analysis, wavelet decomposition, GLCM features and low confidence head detections, to estimate the counts. Each of these sources gives a separate estimate of the count along with confidences and other statistical measures which are then combined to obtain the final estimate. We test our method on an existing dataset of fifty images containing over 64000 individuals. Further, we added another fifty annotated images of crowds and tested on the complete dataset of hundred images containing over 87000 individuals. The counts per image range from 81 to 4633. We report the performance in terms of mean absolute error, which is a measure of accuracy of the method, and mean normalised absolute error, which is a measure of the robustness.