Elnaz Jahani Heravi

Farzan Erlik Nowruzi, Dhanvin Kolhatkar, Prince Kapoor et al.

Camera and Lidar processing have been revolutionized with the rapid development of deep learning model architectures. Automotive radar is one of the crucial elements of automated driver assistance and autonomous driving systems. Radar still relies on traditional signal processing techniques, unlike camera and Lidar based methods. We believe this is the missing link to achieve the most robust perception system. Identifying drivable space and occupied space is the first step in any autonomous decision making task. Occupancy grid map representation of the environment is often used for this purpose. In this paper, we propose PolarNet, a deep neural model to process radar information in polar domain for open space segmentation. We explore various input-output representations. Our experiments show that PolarNet is a effective way to process radar data that achieves state-of-the-art performance and processing speeds while maintaining a compact size.

Farzan Erlik Nowruzi, Dhanvin Kolhatkar, Prince Kapoor et al.

In this work, we propose the use of radar with advanced deep segmentation models to identify open space in parking scenarios. A publically available dataset of radar observations called SCORP was collected. Deep models are evaluated with various radar input representations. Our proposed approach achieves low memory usage and real-time processing speeds, and is thus very well suited for embedded deployment.

Elnaz J. Heravi, Hamed H. Aghdam, Domenec Puig

Understanding the internal process of ConvNets is commonly done using visualization techniques. However, these techniques do not usually provide a tool for estimating the stability of a ConvNet against noise. In this paper, we show how to analyze a ConvNet in the frequency domain using a 4-dimensional visualization technique. Using the frequency domain analysis, we show the reason that a ConvNet might be sensitive to a very low magnitude additive noise. Our experiments on a few ConvNets trained on different datasets revealed that convolution kernels of a trained ConvNet usually pass most of the frequencies and they are not able to effectively eliminate the effect of high frequencies. Our next experiments shows that a convolution kernel which has a more concentrated frequency response could be more stable. Finally, we show that fine-tuning a ConvNet using a training set augmented with noisy images can produce more stable ConvNets.