Wee-Hong Ong

Hafiq Anas, Ong Wee Hong, Owais Ahmed Malik

Current state-of-the-art crowd navigation approaches are mainly deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based. However, DRL-based methods suffer from the issues of generalization and scalability. To overcome these challenges, we propose a method that includes a Collision Probability (CP) in the observation space to give the robot a sense of the level of danger of the moving crowd to help the robot navigate safely through crowds with unseen behaviors. We studied the effects of changing the number of moving obstacles to pay attention during navigation. During training, we generated local waypoints to increase the reward density and improve the learning efficiency of the system. Our approach was developed using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and trained using the Gazebo simulator in a non-cooperative crowd environment with obstacles moving at randomized speeds and directions. We then evaluated our model on four different crowd-behavior scenarios. The results show that our method achieved a 100% success rate in all test settings. We compared our approach with a current state-of-the-art DRL-based approach, and our approach has performed significantly better, especially in terms of social safety. Importantly, our method can navigate in different crowd behaviors and requires no fine-tuning after being trained once. We further demonstrated the crowd navigation capability of our model in real-world tests.

Gusti Ahmad Fanshuri Alfarisy, Owais Ahmed Malik, Ong Wee Hong

Open-World Recognition (OWR) is an emerging field that makes a machine learning model competent in rejecting the unknowns, managing them, and incrementally adding novel samples to the base knowledge. However, this broad objective is not practical for an agent that works on a specific task. Not all rejected samples will be used for learning continually in the future. Some novel images in the open environment may not belong to the domain of interest. Hence, identifying the unknown in the domain of interest is essential for a machine learning model to learn merely the important samples. In this study, we propose an evaluation protocol for estimating a model's capability in separating unknown in-domain (ID) and unknown out-of-domain (OOD). We evaluated using three approaches with an unknown domain and demonstrated the possibility of identifying the domain of interest using the pre-trained parameters through traditional transfer learning, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), and Nearest Class Mean (NCM) classifier with First Integer Neighbor Clustering Hierarchy (FINCH). We experimented with five different domains: garbage, food, dogs, plants, and birds. The results show that all approaches can be used as an initial baseline yielding a good accuracy. In addition, a Balanced Accuracy (BACCU) score from a pre-trained model indicates a tendency to excel in one or more domains of interest. We observed that MobileNetV3 yielded the highest BACCU score for the garbage domain and surpassed complex models such as the transformer network. Meanwhile, our results also suggest that a strong representation in the pre-trained model is important for identifying unknown classes in the same domain. This study could open the bridge toward open-world recognition in domain-specific tasks where the relevancy of the unknown classes is vital.

Parham Hadikhani, Daphne Teck Ching Lai, Wee-Hong Ong

Human activity discovery aims to cluster the activities performed by humans without any prior information on what defines each activity. Most methods presented in human activity recognition are supervised, where there are labeled inputs to train the system. In reality, it is difficult to label activities data because of its huge volume and the variety of human activities. This paper proposes an unsupervised framework to perform human activity discovery in 3D skeleton sequences. First, an approach for data pre-processing is presented. In this stage, important frames are selected based on kinetic energy. Next, the displacement of joints, statistical displacements, angles, and orientation features are extracted to represent the activities information. Since not all extracted features have useful information, the dimension of features is reduced using PCA. Most methods proposed for human activity discovery are not fully unsupervised. They use pre-segmented videos before categorizing activities. To deal with this, we have used a sliding time window to segment the time series of activities with some overlapping. Then, activities are discovered by our proposed Hybrid Particle swarm optimization (PSO) with Gaussian Mutation and K-means (HPGMK) algorithm to provide diverse solutions. PSO is used due to its straightforward idea and powerful global search capability which can identify the ideal solution in a few iterations. Finally, k-means is applied to the outcome centroids from each iteration of the PSO to overcome the slow convergence rate of PSO. The experiment results on five datasets show that the proposed framework has superior performance in discovering activities compared to the other state-of-the-art methods and has increased accuracy of at least 4% on average.

Hafiq Anas, Wee Hong Ong

This paper presents an implementation of autonomous navigation functionality based on Robot Operating System (ROS) on a wheeled differential drive mobile platform called Eddie robot. ROS is a framework that contains many reusable software stacks as well as visualization and debugging tools that provides an ideal environment for any robotic project development. The main contribution of this paper is the description of the customized hardware and software system setup of Eddie robot to work with an autonomous navigation system in ROS called Navigation Stack and to implement one application use case for autonomous navigation. For this paper, photo taking is chosen to demonstrate a use case of the mobile robot.

Burhan Rashid Hussein, Owais Ahmed Malik, Wee-Hong Ong et al.

Herbarium contains treasures of millions of specimens which have been preserved for several years for scientific studies. To speed up more scientific discoveries, a digitization of these specimens is currently on going to facilitate easy access and sharing of its data to a wider scientific community. Online digital repositories such as IDigBio and GBIF have already accumulated millions of specimen images yet to be explored. This presents a perfect time to automate and speed up more novel discoveries using machine learning and computer vision. In this study, a thorough analysis and comparison of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies which focus on application of computer vision and machine learning techniques to digitized herbarium specimen have been examined. The study categorizes different techniques and applications which have been commonly used and it also highlights existing challenges together with their possible solutions. It is our hope that the outcome of this study will serve as a strong foundation for beginners of the relevant field and will also shed more light for both computer science and ecology experts.

Hafiq Anas, Bacha Rehman, Wee Hong Ong

This paper describes the proposed methodology, data used and the results of our participation in the ChallengeTrack 2 (Expr Challenge Track) of the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition 2020. In this competition, we have used a proposed deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to perform automatic facial expression recognition (AFER) on the given dataset. Our proposed model has achieved an accuracy of 50.77% and an F1 score of 29.16% on the validation set.