Zhao Chen

Ameya Phalak, Zhao Chen, Darvin Yi et al.

We present DeepPerimeter, a deep learning based pipeline for inferring a full indoor perimeter (i.e. exterior boundary map) from a sequence of posed RGB images. Our method relies on robust deep methods for depth estimation and wall segmentation to generate an exterior boundary point cloud, and then uses deep unsupervised clustering to fit wall planes to obtain a final boundary map of the room. We demonstrate that DeepPerimeter results in excellent visual and quantitative performance on the popular ScanNet and FloorNet datasets and works for room shapes of various complexities as well as in multiroom scenarios. We also establish important baselines for future work on indoor perimeter estimation, topics which will become increasingly prevalent as application areas like augmented reality and robotics become more significant.

Ayan Sinha, Zhao Chen, Vijay Badrinarayanan et al.

We propose gradient adversarial training, an auxiliary deep learning framework applicable to different machine learning problems. In gradient adversarial training, we leverage a prior belief that in many contexts, simultaneous gradient updates should be statistically indistinguishable from each other. We enforce this consistency using an auxiliary network that classifies the origin of the gradient tensor, and the main network serves as an adversary to the auxiliary network in addition to performing standard task-based training. We demonstrate gradient adversarial training for three different scenarios: (1) as a defense to adversarial examples we classify gradient tensors and tune them to be agnostic to the class of their corresponding example, (2) for knowledge distillation, we do binary classification of gradient tensors derived from the student or teacher network and tune the student gradient tensor to mimic the teacher's gradient tensor; and (3) for multi-task learning we classify the gradient tensors derived from different task loss functions and tune them to be statistically indistinguishable. For each of the three scenarios we show the potential of gradient adversarial training procedure. Specifically, gradient adversarial training increases the robustness of a network to adversarial attacks, is able to better distill the knowledge from a teacher network to a student network compared to soft targets, and boosts multi-task learning by aligning the gradient tensors derived from the task specific loss functions. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that gradient tensors contain latent information about whatever tasks are being trained, and can support diverse machine learning problems when intelligently guided through adversarialization using a auxiliary network.

Zhao Chen, Vijay Badrinarayanan, Gilad Drozdov et al.

We present a deep model that can accurately produce dense depth maps given an RGB image with known depth at a very sparse set of pixels. The model works simultaneously for both indoor/outdoor scenes and produces state-of-the-art dense depth maps at nearly real-time speeds on both the NYUv2 and KITTI datasets. We surpass the state-of-the-art for monocular depth estimation even with depth values for only 1 out of every ~10000 image pixels, and we outperform other sparse-to-dense depth methods at all sparsity levels. With depth values for 1/256 of the image pixels, we achieve a mean absolute error of less than 1% of actual depth on indoor scenes, comparable to the performance of consumer-grade depth sensor hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that it would indeed be possible to efficiently transform sparse depth measurements obtained using e.g. lower-power depth sensors or SLAM systems into high-quality dense depth maps.