James R. Hopgood

Runze Gan, Qing Li, Simon J. Godsill et al.

Multi-object detection and tracking from noisy point clouds remain challenging in many data-scarce radar applications. Current Bayesian trackers based on Poisson measurement models offer a training-free solution but struggle to achieve accuracy and efficiency under severe clutter, large object populations, and full-resolution Doppler point clouds. We address this with PiVoT, a fast, clutter-resilient multi-object tracker for both positional and Doppler measurements. PiVoT performs end-to-end detection and tracking of a large and time-varying number of objects without external clustering or detectors, through joint inference of object states, shapes, existence probabilities, data association, and measurement rates. Its efficiency is driven by several variational inference innovations, such as theoretically justified birth pruning, quadratic-to-linear complexity reductions for exact updates, and a computationally efficient Doppler Poisson model. Experiments show that PiVoT substantially outperforms existing Bayesian trackers in challenging scenes, while also demonstrating exceptional scalability to a thousand objects, robustness to clutter visually inseparable from objects, and real-time operation on full-scale modern automotive radar datasets, where it attains performance comparable to a deep-learning detection benchmark as a training-free joint detector and tracker.

Isabel Schlangen, André Brandenburger, Mengwei Sun et al.

The performance of tracking algorithms strongly depends on the chosen model assumptions regarding the target dynamics. If there is a strong mismatch between the chosen model and the true object motion, the track quality may be poor or the track is easily lost. Still, the true dynamics might not be known a priori or it is too complex to be expressed in a tractable mathematical formulation. This paper provides a comparative study between three different methods that use machine learning to describe the underlying object motion based on training data. The first method builds on Gaussian Processes (GPs) for predicting the object motion, the second learns the parameters of an Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) filter and the third uses a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network as a motion model. All methods are compared against an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) with an analytic motion model as a benchmark and their respective strengths are highlighted in one simulated and two real-world scenarios.

Qiang Wang, Susan Fernandes, Gareth O. S. Williams et al.

Autofluorescence lifetime images reveal unique characteristics of endogenous fluorescence in biological samples. Comprehensive understanding and clinical diagnosis rely on co-registration with the gold standard, histology images, which is extremely challenging due to the difference of both images. Here, we show an unsupervised image-to-image translation network that significantly improves the success of the co-registration using a conventional optimisation-based regression network, applicable to autofluorescence lifetime images at different emission wavelengths. A preliminary blind comparison by experienced researchers shows the superiority of our method on co-registration. The results also indicate that the approach is applicable to various image formats, like fluorescence intensity images. With the registration, stitching outcomes illustrate the distinct differences of the spectral lifetime across an unstained tissue, enabling macro-level rapid visual identification of lung cancer and cellular-level characterisation of cell variants and common types. The approach could be effortlessly extended to lifetime images beyond this range and other staining technologies.

Puneet S Chhabra, Andrew M Wallace, James R Hopgood

Discrete return (DR) Laser Detection and Ranging (Ladar) systems provide a series of echoes that reflect from objects in a scene. These can be first, last or multi-echo returns. In contrast, Full-Waveform (FW)-Ladar systems measure the intensity of light reflected from objects continuously over a period of time. In a camouflaged scenario, e.g., objects hidden behind dense foliage, a FW-Ladar penetrates such foliage and returns a sequence of echoes including buried faint echoes. The aim of this paper is to learn local-patterns of co-occurring echoes characterised by their measured spectra. A deviation from such patterns defines an abnormal event in a forest/tree depth profile. As far as the authors know, neither DR or FW-Ladar, along with several spectral measurements, has not been applied to anomaly detection. This work presents an algorithm that allows detection of spectral and temporal anomalies in FW-Multi Spectral Ladar (FW-MSL) data samples. An anomaly is defined as a full waveform temporal and spectral signature that does not conform to a prior expectation, represented using a learnt subspace (dictionary) and set of coefficients that capture co-occurring local-patterns using an overlapping temporal window. A modified optimization scheme is proposed for subspace learning based on stochastic approximations. The objective function is augmented with a discriminative term that represents the subspace's separability properties and supports anomaly characterisation. The algorithm detects several man-made objects and anomalous spectra hidden in a dense clutter of vegetation and also allows tree species classification.