Mahmoud Shaker

Mohamed Afifi, Yara Ali, Karim Amer et al.

Detection of pedestrians on embedded devices, such as those on-board of robots and drones, has many applications including road intersection monitoring, security, crowd monitoring and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem can be challenging due to continuously-changing camera viewpoint and varying object appearances as well as the need for lightweight algorithms suitable for embedded systems. This paper proposes a robust framework for pedestrian detection in many footages. The framework performs fine and coarse detections on different image regions and exploits temporal and spatial characteristics to attain enhanced accuracy and real time performance on embedded boards. The framework uses the Yolo-v3 object detection [1] as its backbone detector and runs on the Nvidia Jetson TX2 embedded board, however other detectors and/or boards can be used as well. The performance of the framework is demonstrated on two established datasets and its achievement of the second place in CVPR 2019 Embedded Real-Time Inference (ERTI) Challenge.

Mohamed Afifi, Yara Ali, Karim Amer et al.

Detection of pedestrians in aerial imagery captured by drones has many applications including intersection monitoring, patrolling, and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem is involved due to continuouslychanging camera viewpoint and object appearance as well as the need for lightweight algorithms to run on on-board embedded systems. To address this issue, the paper proposes a framework for pedestrian detection in videos based on the YOLO object detection network [6] while having a high throughput of more than 5 FPS on the Jetson TX2 embedded board. The framework exploits deep learning for robust operation and uses a pre-trained model without the need for any additional training which makes it flexible to apply on different setups with minimum amount of tuning. The method achieves ~81 mAP when applied on a sample video from the Embedded Real-Time Inference (ERTI) Challenge where pedestrians are monitored by a UAV.

M. Samy, K. Amer, M. Shaker et al.

his paper presents a simple approach for drone navigation to follow a predetermined path using visual input only without reliance on a Global Positioning System (GPS). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to output the steering command of the drone in an end-to-end approach. We tested our approach in two simulated environments in the Unreal Engine using the AirSim plugin for drone simulation. Results show that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, has average cross track distance less than 2.9 meters in the simulated environment. We also investigate the significance of data augmentation in path following. Finally, we conclude by suggesting possible enhancements for extending our approach to more difficult paths in real life, in the hope that one day visual navigation will become the norm in GPS-denied zones.