Chao Chen

Taiyi Pan, Junyang He, Chao Chen et al.

Visual place recognition (VPR) enables autonomous robots to identify previously visited locations, which contributes to tasks like simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). VPR faces challenges such as accurate image neighbor retrieval and appearance change in scenery. Event cameras, also known as dynamic vision sensors, are a new sensor modality for VPR and offer a promising solution to the challenges with their unique attributes: high temporal resolution (1MHz clock), ultra-low latency (in μs), and high dynamic range (>120dB). These attributes make event cameras less susceptible to motion blur and more robust in variable lighting conditions, making them suitable for addressing VPR challenges. However, the scarcity of event-based VPR datasets, partly due to the novelty and cost of event cameras, hampers their adoption. To fill this data gap, our paper introduces the NYC-Event-VPR dataset to the robotics and computer vision communities, featuring the Prophesee IMX636 HD event sensor (1280x720 resolution), combined with RGB camera and GPS module. It encompasses over 13 hours of geotagged event data, spanning 260 kilometers across New York City, covering diverse lighting and weather conditions, day/night scenarios, and multiple visits to various locations. Furthermore, our paper employs three frameworks to conduct generalization performance assessments, promoting innovation in event-based VPR and its integration into robotics applications.

Liujuan Cao, Jianghang Lin, Zebo Hong et al.

Most WSOD methods rely on traditional object proposals to generate candidate regions and are confronted with unstable training, which easily gets stuck in a poor local optimum. In this paper, we introduce a unified, high-capacity weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) network called HUWSOD, which utilizes a comprehensive self-training framework without needing external modules or additional supervision. HUWSOD innovatively incorporates a self-supervised proposal generator and an autoencoder proposal generator with a multi-rate resampling pyramid to replace traditional object proposals, enabling end-to-end WSOD training and inference. Additionally, we implement a holistic self-training scheme that refines detection scores and coordinates through step-wise entropy minimization and consistency-constraint regularization, ensuring consistent predictions across stochastic augmentations of the same image. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that HUWSOD competes with state-of-the-art WSOD methods, eliminating the need for offline proposals and additional data. The peak performance of HUWSOD approaches that of fully-supervised Faster R-CNN. Our findings also indicate that randomly initialized boxes, although significantly different from well-designed offline object proposals, are effective for WSOD training.

Pengxiang Wu, Songzhu Zheng, Mayank Goswami et al.

Noisy labels can impair the performance of deep neural networks. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a new method for filtering label noise. Unlike most existing methods relying on the posterior probability of a noisy classifier, we focus on the much richer spatial behavior of data in the latent representational space. By leveraging the high-order topological information of data, we are able to collect most of the clean data and train a high-quality model. Theoretically we prove that this topological approach is guaranteed to collect the clean data with high probability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts and is robust to a broad spectrum of noise types and levels.