Cedric Pradalier

Luis Felipe Wolf Batista, Salim Khazem, Mehran Adibi et al.

Plastic waste in aquatic environments poses severe risks to marine life and human health. Autonomous robots can be utilized to collect floating waste, but they require accurate object identification capability. While deep learning has been widely used as a powerful tool for this task, its performance is significantly limited by outdoor light conditions and water surface reflection. Light polarization, abundant in such environments yet invisible to the human eye, can be captured by modern sensors to significantly improve litter detection accuracy on water surfaces. With this goal in mind, we introduce PoTATO, a dataset containing 12,380 labeled plastic bottles and rich polarimetric information. We demonstrate under which conditions polarization can enhance object detection and, by providing raw image data, we offer an opportunity for the research community to explore novel approaches and push the boundaries of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms even further. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/luisfelipewb/ PoTATO/tree/eccv2024.

Matteo El-Hariry, Antoine Richard, Ricard M. Castan et al.

Autonomous robots must navigate and operate in diverse environments, from terrestrial and aquatic settings to aerial and space domains. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in training policies for specific autonomous robots, existing frameworks and benchmarks are often constrained to unique platforms, limiting generalization and fair comparisons across different mobility systems. In this paper, we present a multi-domain framework for training, evaluating and deploying RL-based navigation policies across diverse robotic platforms and operational environments. Our work presents four key contributions: (1) a scalable and modular framework, facilitating seamless robot-task interchangeability and reproducible training pipelines; (2) sim-to-real transfer demonstrated through real-world experiments with multiple robots, including a satellite robotic simulator, an unmanned surface vessel, and a wheeled ground vehicle; (3) the release of the first open-source API for deploying Isaac Lab-trained policies to real robots, enabling lightweight inference and rapid field validation; and (4) uniform tasks and metrics for cross-medium evaluation, through a unified evaluation testbed to assess performance of navigation tasks in diverse operational conditions (aquatic, terrestrial and space). By ensuring consistency between simulation and real-world deployment, RoboRAN lowers the barrier to developing adaptable RL-based navigation strategies. Its modular design enables straightforward integration of new robots and tasks through predefined templates, fostering reproducibility and extension to diverse domains. To support the community, we release RoboRAN as open-source.

Luis F. W. Batista, Tom Bourbon, Cedric Pradalier

Accurate segmentation of floating debris on water is often compromised by surface glare and changing outdoor illumination. Polarimetric imaging offers a single-sensor route to mitigate water-surface glare that disrupts semantic segmentation of floating objects. We benchmark state-of-the-art fusion networks on PoTATO, a public dataset of polarimetric images of plastic bottles in inland waterways, and compare their performance with single-image baselines using traditional models. Our results indicate that polarimetric cues help recover low-contrast objects and suppress reflection-induced false positives, raising mean IoU and lowering contour error relative to RGB inputs. These sharper masks come at a cost: the additional channels enlarge the models increasing the computational load and introducing the risk of new false positives. By providing a reproducible, diagnostic benchmark and publicly available code, we hope to help researchers choose if polarized cameras are suitable for their applications and to accelerate related research.

Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Assia Benbihi, Martin Laviale et al.

Recent works show that the data distribution in a network's latent space is useful for estimating classification uncertainty and detecting Out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. To obtain a well-regularized latent space that is conducive for uncertainty estimation, existing methods bring in significant changes to model architectures and training procedures. In this paper, we present a lightweight, fast, and high-performance regularization method for Mahalanobis distance-based uncertainty prediction, and that requires minimal changes to the network's architecture. To derive Gaussian latent representation favourable for Mahalanobis Distance calculation, we introduce a self-supervised representation learning method that separates in-class representations into multiple Gaussians. Classes with non-Gaussian representations are automatically identified and dynamically clustered into multiple new classes that are approximately Gaussian. Evaluation on standard OOD benchmarks shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on OOD detection with minimal inference time, and is very competitive on predictive probability calibration. Finally, we show the applicability of our method to a real-life computer vision use case on microorganism classification.

Antoine Richard, Stephanie Aravecchia, Thomas Schillaci et al.

In this paper we apply Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) and Domain Randomization to solve a navigation task in a natural environment relying solely on a 2D laser scanner. We train a model-based RL agent in simulation to follow lake and river shores and apply it on a real Unmanned Surface Vehicle in a zero-shot setup. We demonstrate that even though the agent has not been trained in the real world, it can fulfill its task successfully and adapt to changes in the robot's environment and dynamics. Finally, we show that the RL agent is more robust, faster, and more accurate than a state-aware Model-Predictive-Controller.

Mejri Mohamed, Antoine Richard, Cedric Pradalier

In the industry, the value of wood-logs strongly depends on their internal structure and more specifically on the knots' distribution inside the trees. As of today, CT-scanners are the prevalent tool to acquire accurate images of the trees internal structure. However, CT-scanners are expensive, and slow, making their use impractical for most industrial applications. Knowing where the knots are within a tree could improve the efficiency of the overall tree industry by reducing waste and improving the quality of wood-logs by-products. In this paper we evaluate different deep-learning based architectures to predict the internal knots distribution of a tree from its outer-shape, something that has never been done before. Three types of techniques based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) will be studied. The architectures are tested on both real and synthetic CT-scanned trees. With these experiments, we demonstrate that CNNs can be used to predict internal knots distribution based on the external surface of the trees. The goal being to show that these inexpensive and fast methods could be used to replace the CT-scanners. Additionally, we look into the performance of several off-the-shelf object-detectors to detect knots inside CT-scanned images. This method is used to autonomously label part of our real CT-scanned trees alleviating the need to manually segment the whole of the images.

Xiaolong Wu, Patricio Vela, Cedric Pradalier

In this work, we propose a monocular visual odometry framework, which allows exploiting the best attributes of edge feature for illumination-robust camera tracking, while at the same time ameliorating the performance degradation of edge mapping. In the front-end, an ICP-based edge registration can provide robust motion estimation and coarse data association under lighting changes. In the back-end, a novel edge-guided data association pipeline searches for the best photometrically matched points along geometrically possible edges through template matching, so that the matches can be further refined in later bundle adjustment. The core of our proposed data association strategy lies in a point-to-edge geometric uncertainty analysis, which analytically derives (1) the probabilistic search length formula that significantly reduces the search space for system speed-up and (2) the geometrical confidence metric for mapping degradation detection based on the predicted depth uncertainty. Moreover, match confidence based patch size adaption strategy is integrated into our pipeline, connecting with other components, to reduce the matching ambiguity. We present extensive analysis and evaluation of our proposed system on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets under the influence of illumination changes and large camera motions, where our proposed system outperforms current state-of-art algorithms.

Xiaolong Wu, Assia Benbihi, Antoine Richard et al.

Recent advances in deep learning for edge detection and segmentation opens up a new path for semantic-edge-based ego-motion estimation. In this work, we propose a robust monocular visual odometry (VO) framework using category-aware semantic edges. It can reconstruct large-scale semantic maps in challenging outdoor environments. The core of our approach is a semantic nearest neighbor field that facilitates a robust data association of edges across frames using semantics. This significantly enlarges the convergence radius during tracking phases. The proposed edge registration method can be easily integrated into direct VO frameworks to estimate photometrically, geometrically, and semantically consistent camera motions. Different types of edges are evaluated and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed system outperforms state-of-art indirect, direct, and semantic monocular VO systems.