Ming Zhang

Zhangjian Ji, Zilong Wang, Ming Zhang et al.

Recently, human pose estimation mainly focuses on how to design a more effective and better deep network structure as human features extractor, and most designed feature extraction networks only introduce the position of each anatomical keypoint to guide their training process. However, we found that some human anatomical keypoints kept their topology invariance, which can help to localize them more accurately when detecting the keypoints on the feature map. But to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature that has specifically studied it. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel 2D human pose estimation method with explicit anatomical keypoints structure constraints, which introduces the topology constraint term that consisting of the differences between the distance and direction of the keypoint-to-keypoint and their groundtruth in the loss object. More importantly, our proposed model can be plugged in the most existing bottom-up or top-down human pose estimation methods and improve their performance. The extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset: COCO keypoint dataset, show that our methods perform favorably against the most existing bottom-up and top-down human pose estimation methods, especially for Lite-HRNet, when our model is plugged into it, its AP scores separately raise by 2.9\% and 3.3\% on COCO val2017 and test-dev2017 datasets.

Ming Zhang, Mingming Zhang, Yiming Chen et al.

In this work, we propose a novel method for performing inertial aided navigation, by using deep neural networks (DNNs). To date, most DNN inertial navigation methods focus on the task of inertial odometry, by taking gyroscope and accelerometer readings as input and regressing for integrated IMU poses (i.e., position and orientation). While this design has been successfully applied on a number of applications, it is not of theoretical performance guarantee unless patterned motion is involved. This inevitably leads to significantly reduced accuracy and robustness in certain use cases. To solve this problem, we design a framework to compute observable IMU integration terms using DNNs, followed by the numerical pose integration and sensor fusion to achieve the performance gain. Specifically, we perform detailed analysis on the motion terms in IMU kinematic equations, propose a dedicated network design, loss functions, and training strategies for the IMU data processing, and conduct extensive experiments. The results show that our method is generally applicable and outperforms both traditional and DNN methods by wide margins.

Zehan Zhang, Ming Zhang, Zhidong Liang et al.

3D vehicle detection based on multi-modal fusion is an important task of many applications such as autonomous driving. Although significant progress has been made, we still observe two aspects that need to be further improvement: First, the specific gain that camera images can bring to 3D detection is seldom explored by previous works. Second, many fusion algorithms run slowly, which is essential for applications with high real-time requirements(autonomous driving). To this end, we propose an end-to-end trainable single-stage multi-modal feature adaptive network in this paper, which uses image information to effectively reduce false positive of 3D detection and has a fast detection speed. A multi-modal adaptive feature fusion module based on channel attention mechanism is proposed to enable the network to adaptively use the feature of each modal. Based on the above mechanism, two fusion technologies are proposed to adapt to different usage scenarios: PointAttentionFusion is suitable for filtering simple false positive and faster; DenseAttentionFusion is suitable for filtering more difficult false positive and has better overall performance. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate significant improvement in filtering false positive over the approach using only point cloud data. Furthermore, the proposed method can provide competitive results and has the fastest speed compared to the published state-of-the-art multi-modal methods in the KITTI benchmark.

Zhidong Liang, Ming Zhang, Zehan Zhang et al.

We present RangeRCNN, a novel and effective 3D object detection framework based on the range image representation. Most existing methods are voxel-based or point-based. Though several optimizations have been introduced to ease the sparsity issue and speed up the running time, the two representations are still computationally inefficient. Compared to them, the range image representation is dense and compact which can exploit powerful 2D convolution. Even so, the range image is not preferred in 3D object detection due to scale variation and occlusion. In this paper, we utilize the dilated residual block (DRB) to better adapt different object scales and obtain a more flexible receptive field. Considering scale variation and occlusion, we propose the RV-PV-BEV (range view-point view-bird's eye view) module to transfer features from RV to BEV. The anchor is defined in BEV which avoids scale variation and occlusion. Neither RV nor BEV can provide enough information for height estimation; therefore, we propose a two-stage RCNN for better 3D detection performance. The aforementioned point view not only serves as a bridge from RV to BEV but also provides pointwise features for RCNN. Experiments show that RangeRCNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI dataset and the Waymo Open dataset, and provides more possibilities for real-time 3D object detection. We further introduce and discuss the data augmentation strategy for the range image based method, which will be very valuable for future research on range image.

Ming Zhang, Yiming Chen, Xiangyu Xu et al.

This paper proposes a novel inertial-aided localization approach by fusing information from multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) and exteroceptive sensors. IMU is a low-cost motion sensor which provides measurements on angular velocity and gravity compensated linear acceleration of a moving platform, and widely used in modern localization systems. To date, most existing inertial-aided localization methods exploit only one single IMU. While the single-IMU localization yields acceptable accuracy and robustness for different use cases, the overall performance can be further improved by using multiple IMUs. To this end, we propose a lightweight and accurate algorithm for fusing measurements from multiple IMUs and exteroceptive sensors, which is able to obtain noticeable performance gain without incurring additional computational cost. To achieve this, we first probabilistically map measurements from all IMUs onto a virtual IMU. This step is performed by stochastic estimation with least-square estimators and probabilistic marginalization of inter-IMU rotational accelerations. Subsequently, the propagation model for both state and error state of the virtual IMU is also derived, which enables the use of the classical filter-based or optimization-based sensor fusion algorithms for localization. Finally, results from both simulation and real-world tests are provided, which demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms competing algorithms by noticeable margins.

Jian Tang, Yifan Yang, Sam Carton et al.

This paper studied generating natural languages at particular contexts or situations. We proposed two novel approaches which encode the contexts into a continuous semantic representation and then decode the semantic representation into text sequences with recurrent neural networks. During decoding, the context information are attended through a gating mechanism, addressing the problem of long-range dependency caused by lengthy sequences. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on user review data, in which rich contexts are available and two informative contexts, sentiments and products, are selected for evaluation. Experiments show that the fake reviews generated by our approaches are very natural. Results of fake review detection with human judges show that more than 50\% of the fake reviews are misclassified as the real reviews, and more than 90\% are misclassified by existing state-of-the-art fake review detection algorithm.