Research

We present a photo-realistic training and evaluation simulator (Sim4CV) with extensive applications across various fields of computer vision. Built on top of the Unreal Engine, the simulator integrates full featured physics based cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and animated human actors in diverse urban and suburban 3D environments. The simulator fully integrates both several state-of-the-art tracking algorithms with a benchmark evaluation tool and a generic deep neural network (DNN) interface for real-time evaluation. It generates synthetic photo-realistic datasets with automatic groundtruth annotations to easily extend existing real-world datasets and provides extensive synthetic data variety through its ability to reconfigure synthetic worlds on the fly using an automatic world generation tool.

Learning to predict scene depth from RGB inputs is a challenging task both for indoor and outdoor robot navigation. In this work we address unsupervised learning of scene depth and robot ego-motion where supervision is provided by monocular videos, as cameras are the cheapest, least restrictive and most ubiquitous sensor for robotics. Previous work in unsupervised image-to-depth learning has established strong baselines in the domain. We propose a novel approach which produces higher quality results, is able to model moving objects and is shown to transfer across data domains, e.g. from outdoors to indoor scenes. The main idea is to introduce geometric structure in the learning process, by modeling the scene and the individual objects; camera ego-motion and object motions are learned from monocular videos as input. Furthermore an online refinement method is introduced to adapt learning on the fly to unknown domains. The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including those that handle motion e.g. through learned flow. Our results are comparable in quality to the ones which used stereo as supervision and significantly improve depth prediction on scenes and datasets which contain a lot of object motion. The approach is of practical relevance, as it allows transfer across environments, by transferring models trained on data collected for robot navigation in urban scenes to indoor navigation settings.

We present a novel and modular deep learning based approach towards autonomous driving. By using the deep network for pathway estimation only (thus de-coupling it from the underlying car controls), we show that tasks such as lane change, obstacle avoidance, and guided driving become straightforward and very simple to implement. Furthermore, changes regarding the vehicle or its behaviour can be applied easily on the controller side without changing the learned network. Our approach even works without any need for human-generated or hand-crafted training data (although manually collected data can be included if available), thus avoiding the high cost and tedious nature of manually collecting training data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by measuring the performance on different diversely arranged environments and maps, showing that it can outperform the capabilities of human drivers significantly.

Automating the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in diverse scenarios has gained much attention in recent years. However, teaching UAVs to fly in challenging environments remains an unsolved problem, mainly due to the lack of training data. In this paper, we train a deep neural network to predict UAV controls from raw image data for the task of autonomous UAV racing in a photo-realistic simulation. Training is done through imitation learning with data augmentation to allow for the correction of navigation mistakes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained network (when sufficient data augmentation is used) outperforms state-of-the-art methods and flies more consistently than many human pilots. Additionally, we show that our optimized network ar- chitecture can run in real-time on embedded hardware, allowing for efficient on- board processing critical for real-world deployment. From a broader perspective, our results underline the importance of extensive data augmentation techniques to improve robustness in end-to-end learning setups.

Recent work has explored the problem of autonomous navigation by imitating a teacher and learning an end-to-end policy, which directly predicts controls from raw images. However, these approaches tend to be sensitive to mistakes by the teacher and do not scale well to other environments or vehicles. To this end, we propose Observational Imitation Learning (OIL), a novel imitation learning variant that supports online training and automatic selection of optimal behavior by observing multiple imperfect teachers. We apply our proposed methodology to the challenging problems of autonomous driving and UAV racing. For both tasks, we utilize the Sim4CV simulator that enables the generation of large amounts of synthetic training data and also allows for online learning and evaluation. We train a perception network to predict waypoints from raw image data and use OIL to train another network to predict controls from these waypoints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained network outperforms its teachers, conventional imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) baselines and even humans in simulation.

High-resolution connectomics data allows for the identification of dysfunctional mitochondria which are linked to a variety of diseases such as autism or bipolar. However, manual analysis is not feasible since datasets can be petabytes in size. We present a fully automatic mitochondria detector based on a modified U-Net architecture that yields high accuracy and fast processing times. We evaluate our method on multiple real-world connectomics datasets, including an improved version of the EPFL mitochondria benchmark. Our results show a Jaccard index of up to 0.90 with inference times lower than 16ms for a 512 x 512px image tile. This speed is faster than the acquisition speed of modern electron microscopes, enabling mitochondria detection in real-time. Compared to previous work, our detector ranks first for real-time detection and can be used for image alignment. Our data, results, and code are freely available.