Xiaoguang Zhao

Shuyao Shi, Neiwen Ling, Zhehao Jiang et al.

Recently,smart roadside infrastructure (SRI) has demonstrated the potential of achieving fully autonomous driving systems. To explore the potential of infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving, this paper presents the design and deployment of Soar, the first end-to-end SRI system specifically designed to support autonomous driving systems. Soar consists of both software and hardware components carefully designed to overcome various system and physical challenges. Soar can leverage the existing operational infrastructure like street lampposts for a lower barrier of adoption. Soar adopts a new communication architecture that comprises a bi-directional multi-hop I2I network and a downlink I2V broadcast service, which are designed based on off-the-shelf 802.11ac interfaces in an integrated manner. Soar also features a hierarchical DL task management framework to achieve desirable load balancing among nodes and enable them to collaborate efficiently to run multiple data-intensive autonomous driving applications. We deployed a total of 18 Soar nodes on existing lampposts on campus, which have been operational for over two years. Our real-world evaluation shows that Soar can support a diverse set of autonomous driving applications and achieve desirable real-time performance and high communication reliability. Our findings and experiences in this work offer key insights into the development and deployment of next-generation smart roadside infrastructure and autonomous driving systems.

Yujia Zhang, Qianzhong Li, Xiaoguang Zhao et al.

Regular pavement inspection plays a significant role in road maintenance for safety assurance. Existing methods mainly address the tasks of crack detection and segmentation that are only tailored for long-thin crack disease. However, there are many other types of diseases with a wider variety of sizes and patterns that are also essential to segment in practice, bringing more challenges towards fine-grained pavement inspection. In this paper, our goal is not only to automatically segment cracks, but also to segment other complex pavement diseases as well as typical landmarks (markings, runway lights, etc.) and commonly seen water/oil stains in a single model. To this end, we propose a three-stream boundary-aware network (TB-Net). It consists of three streams fusing the low-level spatial and the high-level contextual representations as well as the detailed boundary information. Specifically, the spatial stream captures rich spatial features. The context stream, where an attention mechanism is utilized, models the contextual relationships over local features. The boundary stream learns detailed boundaries using a global-gated convolution to further refine the segmentation outputs. The network is trained using a dual-task loss in an end-to-end manner, and experiments on a newly collected fine-grained pavement disease dataset show the effectiveness of our TB-Net.

Jinting Wu, Yujia Zhang, Xiaoguang Zhao et al.

Although automatic emotion recognition from facial expressions and speech has made remarkable progress, emotion recognition from body gestures has not been thoroughly explored. People often use a variety of body language to express emotions, and it is difficult to enumerate all emotional body gestures and collect enough samples for each category. Therefore, recognizing new emotional body gestures is critical for better understanding human emotions. However, the existing methods fail to accurately determine which emotional state a new body gesture belongs to. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) framework, which consists of three branches to infer the emotional state of the new body gestures with only their semantic descriptions. The first branch is a Prototype-Based Detector (PBD) which is used to determine whether an sample belongs to a seen body gesture category and obtain the prediction results of the samples from the seen categories. The second branch is a Stacked AutoEncoder (StAE) with manifold regularization, which utilizes semantic representations to predict samples from unseen categories. Note that both of the above branches are for body gesture recognition. We further add an emotion classifier with a softmax layer as the third branch in order to better learn the feature representations for this emotion classification task. The input features for these three branches are learned by a shared feature extraction network, i.e., a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (BLSTM) with a self-attention module. We treat these three branches as subtasks and use multi-task learning strategies for joint training. The performance of our framework on an emotion recognition dataset is significantly superior to the traditional method of emotion classification and state-of-the-art zero-shot learning methods.

Jinting Wu, Yujia Zhang, Xiaoguang Zhao

Hand gesture recognition plays a significant role in human-computer interaction for understanding various human gestures and their intent. However, most prior works can only recognize gestures of limited labeled classes and fail to adapt to new categories. The task of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) for hand gesture recognition aims to address the above issue by leveraging semantic representations and detecting both seen and unseen class samples. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end prototype-based GZSL framework for hand gesture recognition which consists of two branches. The first branch is a prototype-based detector that learns gesture representations and determines whether an input sample belongs to a seen or unseen category. The second branch is a zero-shot label predictor which takes the features of unseen classes as input and outputs predictions through a learned mapping mechanism between the feature and the semantic space. We further establish a hand gesture dataset that specifically targets this GZSL task, and comprehensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on recognizing both seen and unseen gestures.