Guruprasad M. Hegde

Christopher Klugmann, Rafid Mahmood, Guruprasad Hegde et al.

Labeling visual data is expensive and time-consuming. Crowdsourcing systems promise to enable highly parallelizable annotations through the participation of monetarily or otherwise motivated workers, but even this approach has its limits. The solution: replace manual work with machine work. But how reliable are machine annotators? Sacrificing data quality for high throughput cannot be acceptable, especially in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper, we present a framework that enables quality checking of visual data at large scales without sacrificing the reliability of the results. We ask annotators simple questions with discrete answers, which can be highly automated using a convolutional neural network trained to predict crowd responses. Unlike the methods of previous work, which aim to directly predict soft labels to address human uncertainty, we use per-task posterior distributions over soft labels as our training objective, leveraging a Dirichlet prior for analytical accessibility. We demonstrate our approach on two challenging real-world automotive datasets, showing that our model can fully automate a significant portion of tasks, saving costs in the high double-digit percentage range. Our model reliably predicts human uncertainty, allowing for more accurate inspection and filtering of difficult examples. Additionally, we show that the posterior distributions over soft labels predicted by our model can be used as priors in further inference processes, reducing the need for numerous human labelers to approximate true soft labels accurately. This results in further cost reductions and more efficient use of human resources in the annotation process.

Sreetama Das, Anirban Nag, Dhruba Adhikary et al.

Social distancing has been suggested as one of the most effective measures to break the chain of viral transmission in the current COVID-19 pandemic. We herein describe a computer vision-based AI-assisted solution to aid compliance with social distancing norms. The solution consists of modules to detect and track people and to identify distance violations. It provides the flexibility to choose between a tool-based mode or an automated mode of camera calibration, making the latter suitable for large-scale deployments. In this paper, we discuss different metrics to assess the risk associated with social distancing violations and how we can differentiate between transient or persistent violations. Our proposed solution performs satisfactorily under different test scenarios, processes video feed at real-time speed as well as addresses data privacy regulations by blurring faces of detected people, making it ideal for deployments.

Guruprasad Hegde, Avinash Nittur Ramesh, Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota et al.

Deep Learning systems have proven to be extremely successful for image recognition tasks for which significant amounts of training data is available, e.g., on the famous ImageNet dataset. We demonstrate that for robotics applications with cheap camera equipment, the low image quality, however,influences the classification accuracy, and freely available databases cannot be exploited in a straight forward way to train classifiers to be used on a robot. As a solution we propose to train a network on degrading the quality images in order to mimic specific low quality imaging systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that classification networks trained by using images produced by our quality degrading network along with the high quality images outperform classification networks trained only on high quality data when used on a real robot system, while being significantly easier to use than competing zero-shot domain adaptation techniques.

Kartik Srivastava, Akash Kumar Singh, Guruprasad M. Hegde

Semantic understanding of scenes in three-dimensional space (3D) is a quintessential part of robotics oriented applications such as autonomous driving as it provides geometric cues such as size, orientation and true distance of separation to objects which are crucial for taking mission critical decisions. As a first step, in this work we investigate the possibility of semantically classifying different parts of a given scene in 3D by learning the underlying geometric context in addition to the texture cues BUT in the absence of labelled real-world datasets. To this end we generate a large number of synthetic scenes, their pixel-wise labels and corresponding 3D representations using CARLA software framework. We then build a deep neural network that learns underlying category specific 3D representation and texture cues from color information of the rendered synthetic scenes. Further on we apply the learned model on different real world datasets to evaluate its performance. Our preliminary investigation of results show that the neural network is able to learn the geometric context from synthetic scenes and effectively apply this knowledge to classify each point of a 3D representation of a scene in real-world.