Mohamed Attia

Mohammed Hossny, Khaled Saleh, Mohammed Attia et al.

LiDAR data is becoming increasingly essential with the rise of autonomous vehicles. Its ability to provide 360deg horizontal field of view of point cloud, equips self-driving vehicles with enhanced situational awareness capabilities. While synthetic LiDAR data generation pipelines provide a good solution to advance the machine learning research on LiDAR, they do suffer from a major shortcoming, which is rendering time. Physically accurate LiDAR simulators (e.g. Blensor) are computationally expensive with an average rendering time of 14-60 seconds per frame for urban scenes. This is often compensated for via using 3D models with simplified polygon topology (low poly assets) as is the case of CARLA (Dosovitskiy et al., 2017). However, this comes at the price of having coarse grained unrealistic LiDAR point clouds. In this paper, we present a novel method to simulate LiDAR point cloud with faster rendering time of 1 sec per frame. The proposed method relies on spherical UV unwrapping of Equirectangular Z-Buffer images. We chose Blensor (Gschwandtner et al., 2011) as the baseline method to compare the point clouds generated using the proposed method. The reported error for complex urban landscapes is 4.28cm for a scanning range between 2-120 meters with Velodyne HDL64-E2 parameters. The proposed method reported a total time per frame to 3.2 +/- 0.31 seconds per frame. In contrast, the BlenSor baseline method reported 16.2 +/- 1.82 seconds.

Mohammed Hossny, Julie Iskander, Mohammed Attia et al.

In this paper, we propose enhancing actor-critic reinforcement learning agents by parameterising the final actor layer which produces the actions in order to accommodate the behaviour discrepancy of different actuators, under different load conditions during interaction with the environment. We propose branching the action producing layer in the actor to learn the tuning parameter controlling the activation layer (e.g. Tanh and Sigmoid). The learned parameters are then used to create tailored activation functions for each actuator. We ran experiments on three OpenAI Gym environments, i.e. Pendulum-v0, LunarLanderContinuous-v2 and BipedalWalker-v2. Results have shown an average of 23.15% and 33.80% increase in total episode reward of the LunarLanderContinuous-v2 and BipedalWalker-v2 environments, respectively. There was no significant improvement in Pendulum-v0 environment but the proposed method produces a more stable actuation signal compared to the state-of-the-art method. The proposed method allows the reinforcement learning actor to produce more robust actions that accommodate the discrepancy in the actuators' response functions. This is particularly useful for real life scenarios where actuators exhibit different response functions depending on the load and the interaction with the environment. This also simplifies the transfer learning problem by fine tuning the parameterised activation layers instead of retraining the entire policy every time an actuator is replaced. Finally, the proposed method would allow better accommodation to biological actuators (e.g. muscles) in biomechanical systems.

Mohamed Attia, Mohammed Hossny, Saeid Nahavandi et al.

In this presented work, we propose a realistic hair simulator using image blending for dermoscopic images. This hair simulator can be used for benchmarking and validation of the hair removal methods and in data augmentation for improving computer aided diagnostic tools. We adopted one of the popular implementation of image blending to superimpose realistic hair masks to hair lesion. This method was able to produce realistic hair masks according to a predefined mask for hair. Thus, the produced hair images and masks can be used as ground truth for hair segmentation and removal methods by inpainting hair according to a pre-defined hair masks on hairfree areas. Also, we achieved a realism score equals to 1.65 in comparison to 1.59 for the state-of-the-art hair simulator.

M. Attia, M. Hossny, S. Nahavandi et al.

In this paper, we proposed using a hybrid method that utilises deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks for accurate delineation of skin lesion of images supplied with ISBI 2017 lesion segmentation challenge. The proposed method was trained using 1800 images and tested on 150 images from ISBI 2017 challenge.