Search for: All records

The uncertainty quantification of prediction mod- els (e.g., neural networks) is crucial for their adoption in many robotics applications. This is arguably as important as making accurate predictions, especially for safety-critical applications such as self-driving cars. This paper proposes our approach to uncertainty quantification in the context of visual localization for autonomous driving, where we predict locations from images. Our proposed framework estimates probabilistic uncertainty by creating a sensor error model that maps an inter- nal output of the prediction model to the uncertainty. The sensor error model is created using multiple image databases of visual localization, each with ground-truth location. We demonstrate the accuracy of our uncertainty prediction framework using the Ithaca365 dataset, which includes variations in lighting, weather (sunny, snowy, night), and alignment errors between databases. We analyze both the predicted uncertainty and its incorporation into a Kalman-based localization filter. Our results show that prediction error variations increase with poor weather and lighting condition, leading to greater uncertainty and outliers, which can be predicted by our proposed uncertainty model. Additionally, our probabilistic error model enables the filter to remove ad hoc sensor gating, as the uncertainty automatically adjusts the model to the input data. 

A self-driving car must be able to reliably handle adverse weather conditions (e.g., snowy) to operate safely. In this paper, we investigate the idea of turning sensor inputs (i.e., images) captured in an adverse condition into a benign one (i.e., sunny), upon which the downstream tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation) can attain high accuracy. Prior work primarily formulates this as an unpaired image-to-image translation problem due to the lack of paired images captured under the exact same camera poses and semantic layouts. While perfectly- aligned images are not available, one can easily obtain coarsely- paired images. For instance, many people drive the same routes daily in both good and adverse weather; thus, images captured at close-by GPS locations can form a pair. Though data from repeated traversals are unlikely to capture the same foreground objects, we posit that they provide rich contextual information to supervise the image translation model. To this end, we propose a novel training objective leveraging coarsely- aligned image pairs. We show that our coarsely-aligned training scheme leads to a better image translation quality and improved downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and visual localization. 

Advances in perception for self-driving cars have accel- erated in recent years due to the availability of large-scale datasets, typically collected at specific locations and under nice weather conditions. Yet, to achieve the high safety re- quirement, these perceptual systems must operate robustly under a wide variety of weather conditions including snow and rain. In this paper, we present a new dataset to enable robust autonomous driving via a novel data collection pro- cess — data is repeatedly recorded along a 15 km route un- der diverse scene (urban, highway, rural, campus), weather (snow, rain, sun), time (day/night), and traffic conditions (pedestrians, cyclists and cars). The dataset includes im- ages and point clouds from cameras and LiDAR sensors, along with high-precision GPS/INS to establish correspon- dence across routes. The dataset includes road and object annotations using amodal masks to capture partial occlu- sions and 3D bounding boxes. We demonstrate the unique- ness of this dataset by analyzing the performance of base- lines in amodal segmentation of road and objects, depth estimation, and 3D object detection. The repeated routes opens new research directions in object discovery, contin- ual learning, and anomaly detection. Link to Ithaca365: https://ithaca365.mae.cornell.edu/