skip to main content


Title: Robust Monocular Edge Visual Odometry through Coarse-to-Fine Data Association
This work describes a monocular visual odometry framework, which exploits the best attributes of edge features 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 provides 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) a probabilistic search length formula that significantly reduces the search space and (2) a geometric confidence metric for mapping degradation detection based on the predicted depth uncertainty. Moreover, a match confidence based patch size adaption strategy is integrated into our pipeline to reduce 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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1816138
NSF-PAR ID:
10287873
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Intelligent Robots and Systems
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4923 to 4929
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract

    Among many structural assessment methods, the change of modal characteristics is considered a well‐accepted damage detection method. However, the presence of environmental or operational variations may pollute the baseline and prevent a dependable assessment of the change. In recent years, the use of machine learning algorithms gained interest within structural health community, especially due to their ability and success in the elimination of ambient uncertainty. This paper proposes an end‐to‐end architecture to detect damage reliably by employing machine learning algorithms. The proposed approach streamlines (a) collection of structural response data, (b) modal analysis using system identification, (c) learning model, and (d) novelty detection. The proposed system aims to extract latent features of accessible modal parameters such as natural frequencies and mode shapes measured at undamaged target structure under temperature uncertainty and to reconstruct a new representation of these features that is similar to the original using well‐established machine learning methods for damage detection. The deviation between measured and reconstructed parameters, also known as novelty index, is the essential information for detecting critical changes in the system. The approach is evaluated by analyzing the structural response data obtained from finite element models and experimental structures. For the machine learning component of the approach, both principal component analysis (PCA) and autoencoder (AE) are examined. While mode shapes are known to be a well‐researched damage indicator in the literature, to our best knowledge, this research is the first time that unsupervised machine learning is applied using PCA and AE to utilize mode shapes in addition to natural frequencies for effective damage detection. The detection performance of this pipeline is compared to a similar approach where its learning model does not utilize mode shapes. The results demonstrate that the effectiveness of the damage detection under temperature variability improves significantly when mode shapes are used in the training of learning algorithm. Especially for small damages, the proposed algorithm performs better in discriminating system changes.

     
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    In Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, perception is both security and safety critical. Despite various prior studies on its security issues, all of them only consider attacks on cameraor LiDAR-based AD perception alone. However, production AD systems today predominantly adopt a Multi-Sensor Fusion (MSF) based design, which in principle can be more robust against these attacks under the assumption that not all fusion sources are (or can be) attacked at the same time. In this paper, we present the first study of security issues of MSF-based perception in AD systems. We directly challenge the basic MSF design assumption above by exploring the possibility of attacking all fusion sources simultaneously. This allows us for the first time to understand how much security guarantee MSF can fundamentally provide as a general defense strategy for AD perception. We formulate the attack as an optimization problem to generate a physically-realizable, adversarial 3D-printed object that misleads an AD system to fail in detecting it and thus crash into it. To systematically generate such a physical-world attack, we propose a novel attack pipeline that addresses two main design challenges: (1) non-differentiable target camera and LiDAR sensing systems, and (2) non-differentiable cell-level aggregated features popularly used in LiDAR-based AD perception. We evaluate our attack on MSF algorithms included in representative open-source industry-grade AD systems in real-world driving scenarios. Our results show that the attack achieves over 90% success rate across different object types and MSF algorithms. Our attack is also found stealthy, robust to victim positions, transferable across MSF algorithms, and physical-world realizable after being 3D-printed and captured by LiDAR and camera devices. To concretely assess the end-to-end safety impact, we further perform simulation evaluation and show that it can cause a 100% vehicle collision rate for an industry-grade AD system. We also evaluate and discuss defense strategies. 
    more » « less
  3. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have started to find their role in the modern healthcare system. DNNs are being developed for diagnosis, prognosis, treatment planning, and outcome prediction for various diseases. With the increasing number of applications of DNNs in modern healthcare, their trustworthiness and reliability are becoming increasingly important. An essential aspect of trustworthiness is detecting the performance degradation and failure of deployed DNNs in medical settings. The softmax output values produced by DNNs are not a calibrated measure of model confidence. Softmax probability numbers are generally higher than the actual model confidence. The model confidence-accuracy gap further increases for wrong predictions and noisy inputs. We employ recently proposed Bayesian deep neural networks (BDNNs) to learn uncertainty in the model parameters. These models simultaneously output the predictions and a measure of confidence in the predictions. By testing these models under various noisy conditions, we show that the (learned) predictive confidence is well calibrated. We use these reliable confidence values for monitoring performance degradation and failure detection in DNNs. We propose two different failure detection methods. In the first method, we define a fixed threshold value based on the behavior of the predictive confidence with changing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the test dataset. The second method learns the threshold value with a neural network. The proposed failure detection mechanisms seamlessly abstain from making decisions when the confidence of the BDNN is below the defined threshold and hold the decision for manual review. Resultantly, the accuracy of the models improves on the unseen test samples. We tested our proposed approach on three medical imaging datasets: PathMNIST, DermaMNIST, and OrganAMNIST, under different levels and types of noise. An increase in the noise of the test images increases the number of abstained samples. BDNNs are inherently robust and show more than 10% accuracy improvement with the proposed failure detection methods. The increased number of abstained samples or an abrupt increase in the predictive variance indicates model performance degradation or possible failure. Our work has the potential to improve the trustworthiness of DNNs and enhance user confidence in the model predictions. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has traditionally been conducted at radio wavelengths, but optical searches are well-motivated and increasingly feasible due to the growing availability of high-resolution spectroscopy. We present a data analysis pipeline to search Automated Planet Finder (APF) spectroscopic observations from the Levy Spectrometer for intense, persistent, narrow-bandwidth optical lasers. We describe the processing of the spectra, the laser search algorithm, and the results of our laser search on 1983 spectra of 388 stars as part of the Breakthrough Listen search for technosignatures. We utilize an empirical spectra-matching algorithm calledSpecMatch-Empto produce residuals between each target spectrum and a set of best-matching catalog spectra, which provides the basis for a more sensitive search than previously possible. We verify thatSpecMatch-Empperforms well on APF-Levy spectra by calibrating the stellar properties derived by the algorithm against theSpecMatch-Emplibrary and against Gaia catalog values. We leverage our unique observing strategy, which produces multiple spectra of each target per night of observing, to increase our detection sensitivity by programmatically rejecting events that do not persist between observations. With our laser search algorithm, we achieve a sensitivity equivalent to the ability to detect an 84 kW laser at the median distance of a star in our data set (78.5 ly). We present the methodology and vetting of our laser search, finding no convincing candidates consistent with potential laser emission in our target sample.

     
    more » « less
  5. The integration of DNN-contextualized binary-pattern-driven non-parametric cost volume and DNN cost aggregation leads to more robust and more generalizable stereo matching. Abstract: Stereo matching is a classic challenging problem in computer vision, which has recently witnessed remarkable progress by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). This paradigm shift leads to two interesting and entangled questions that have not been addressed well. First, it is unclear whether stereo matching DNNs that are trained from scratch really learn to perform matching well. This paper studies this problem from the lens of white-box adversarial attacks. It presents a method of learning stereo-constrained photometrically-consistent attacks, which by design are weaker adversarial attacks, and yet can cause catastrophic performance drop for those DNNs. This observation suggests that they may not actually learn to perform matching well in the sense that they should otherwise achieve potentially even better after stereo-constrained perturbations are introduced. Second, stereo matching DNNs are typically trained under the simulation-to-real (Sim2Real) pipeline due to the data hungriness of DNNs. Thus, alleviating the impacts of the Sim2Real photometric gap in stereo matching DNNs becomes a pressing need. Towards joint adversarially robust and domain generalizable stereo matching, this paper proposes to learn DNN-contextualized binary-pattern-driven non-parametric cost-volumes. It leverages the perspective of learning the cost aggregation via DNNs, and presents a simple yet expressive design that is fully end-to-end trainable, without resorting to specific aggregation inductive biases. In experiments, the proposed method is tested in the SceneFlow dataset, the KITTI2015 dataset, and the Middlebury dataset. It significantly improves the adversarial robustness, while retaining accuracy performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. It also shows a better Sim2Real generalizability. Our code and pretrained models are released at \href{https://github.com/kelkelcheng/AdversariallyRobustStereo}{this Github Repo}. 
    more » « less