Qing Gao

Junjie Hu, Chenyu Bao, Mete Ozay et al.

Depth completion aims at predicting dense pixel-wise depth from an extremely sparse map captured from a depth sensor, e.g., LiDARs. It plays an essential role in various applications such as autonomous driving, 3D reconstruction, augmented reality, and robot navigation. Recent successes on the task have been demonstrated and dominated by deep learning based solutions. In this article, for the first time, we provide a comprehensive literature review that helps readers better grasp the research trends and clearly understand the current advances. We investigate the related studies from the design aspects of network architectures, loss functions, benchmark datasets, and learning strategies with a proposal of a novel taxonomy that categorizes existing methods. Besides, we present a quantitative comparison of model performance on three widely used benchmarks, including indoor and outdoor datasets. Finally, we discuss the challenges of prior works and provide readers with some insights for future research directions.

Qi Yu, Daoyi Dong, Ian R. Petersen et al.

A filtering problem for a class of quantum systems disturbed by a classical stochastic process is investigated in this paper. The classical disturbance process, which is assumed to be described by a linear stochastic differential equation, is modeled by a quantum cavity model. Then the hybrid quantum-classical system is described by a combined quantum system consisting of two quantum cavity subsystems. Quantum filtering theory and a quantum extended Kalman filter method are employed to estimate the states of the combined quantum system. An estimate of the classical stochastic process is derived from the estimate of the combined quantum system. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed methods are illustrated by numerical results.

Junjie Hu, Chenyou Fan, Liguang Zhou et al.

With the rapid advancements in autonomous driving and robot navigation, there is a growing demand for lifelong learning models capable of estimating metric (absolute) depth. Lifelong learning approaches potentially offer significant cost savings in terms of model training, data storage, and collection. However, the quality of RGB images and depth maps is sensor-dependent, and depth maps in the real world exhibit domain-specific characteristics, leading to variations in depth ranges. These challenges limit existing methods to lifelong learning scenarios with small domain gaps and relative depth map estimation. To facilitate lifelong metric depth learning, we identify three crucial technical challenges that require attention: i) developing a model capable of addressing the depth scale variation through scale-aware depth learning, ii) devising an effective learning strategy to handle significant domain gaps, and iii) creating an automated solution for domain-aware depth inference in practical applications. Based on the aforementioned considerations, in this paper, we present i) a lightweight multi-head framework that effectively tackles the depth scale imbalance, ii) an uncertainty-aware lifelong learning solution that adeptly handles significant domain gaps, and iii) an online domain-specific predictor selection method for real-time inference. Through extensive numerical studies, we show that the proposed method can achieve good efficiency, stability, and plasticity, leading the benchmarks by 8% to 15%.

Yingbai Hu, Jian Li, Yongquan Chen et al.

The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID-19 OP-swab sampling. This robot is composed of a visual system, UR5 robot arm, micro-pneumatic actuator and force-sensing system. The robot is expected to reduce risk and free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work. Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way. In addition, a varying-parameter zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOF redundant manipulator. The developed robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and volunteers.

Qing Gao, Mingtao Pei, Hongyu Shen

A healthy lifestyle is the key to better health and happiness and has a considerable effect on quality of life and disease prevention. Current lifelogging/egocentric datasets are not suitable for lifestyle analysis; consequently, there is no research on lifestyle analysis in the field of computer vision. In this work, we investigate the problem of lifestyle analysis and build a visual lifelogging dataset for lifestyle analysis (VLDLA). The VLDLA contains images captured by a wearable camera every 3 seconds from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm for seven days. In contrast to current lifelogging/egocentric datasets, our dataset is suitable for lifestyle analysis as images are taken with short intervals to capture activities of short duration; moreover, images are taken continuously from morning to evening to record all the activities performed by a user. Based on our dataset, we classify the user activities in each frame and use three latent fluents of the user, which change over time and are associated with activities, to measure the healthy degree of the user's lifestyle. The scores for the three latent fluents are computed based on recognized activities, and the healthy degree of the lifestyle for the day is determined based on the scores for the latent fluents. Experimental results show that our method can be used to analyze the healthiness of users' lifestyles.