arXiv subjects

Akshay Rangesh

Publications and source records attributed to Akshay Rangesh.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

HandyNet: A One-stop Solution to Detect, Segment, Localize & Analyze Driver Hands

Tasks related to human hands have long been part of the computer vision community. Hands being the primary actuators for humans, convey a lot about activities and intents, in addition to being an alternative form of communication/interaction with other humans and machines. In this study, we focus on training a single feedforward convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of executing many hand related tasks that may be of use in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles of the future. The resulting network, which we refer to as HandyNet, is capable of detecting, segmenting and localizing (in 3D) driver hands inside a vehicle cabin. The network is additionally trained to identify handheld objects that the driver may be interacting with. To meet the data requirements to train such a network, we propose a method for cheap annotation based on chroma-keying, thereby bypassing weeks of human effort required to label such data. This process can generate thousands of labeled training samples in an efficient manner, and may be replicated in new environments with relative ease.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Driver Gaze Zone Estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks: A General Framework and Ablative Analysis

Driver gaze has been shown to be an excellent surrogate for driver attention in intelligent vehicles. With the recent surge of highly autonomous vehicles, driver gaze can be useful for determining the handoff time to a human driver. While there has been significant improvement in personalized driver gaze zone estimation systems, a generalized system which is invariant to different subjects, perspectives and scales is still lacking. We take a step towards this generalized system using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We finetune 4 popular CNN architectures for this task, and provide extensive comparisons of their outputs. We additionally experiment with different input image patches, and also examine how image size affects performance. For training and testing the networks, we collect a large naturalistic driving dataset comprising of 11 long drives, driven by 10 subjects in two different cars. Our best performing model achieves an accuracy of 95.18% during cross-subject testing, outperforming current state of the art techniques for this task. Finally, we evaluate our best performing model on the publicly available Columbia Gaze Dataset comprising of images from 56 subjects with varying head pose and gaze directions. Without any training, our model successfully encodes the different gaze directions on this diverse dataset, demonstrating good generalization capabilities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Driver Hand Localization and Grasp Analysis: A Vision-based Real-time Approach

Extracting hand regions and their grasp information from images robustly in real-time is critical for occupants' safety and in-vehicular infotainment applications. It must however, be noted that naturalistic driving scenes suffer from rapidly changing illumination and occlusion. This is aggravated by the fact that hands are highly deformable objects, and change in appearance frequently. This work addresses the task of accurately localizing driver hands and classifying the grasp state of each hand. We use a fast ConvNet to first detect likely hand regions. Next, a pixel-based skin classifier that takes into account the global illumination changes is used to refine the hand detections and remove false positives. This step generates a pixel-level mask for each hand. Finally, we study each such masked regions and detect if the driver is grasping the wheel, or in some cases a mobile phone. Through evaluation we demonstrate that our method can outperform state-of-the-art pixel based hand detectors, while running faster (at 35 fps) than other deep ConvNet based frameworks even for grasp analysis. Hand mask cues are shown to be crucial when analyzing a set of driver hand gestures (wheel/mobile phone grasp and no-grasp) in naturalistic driving settings. The proposed detection and localization pipeline hence can act as a general framework for real-time hand detection and gesture classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

When Vehicles See Pedestrians with Phones:A Multi-Cue Framework for Recognizing Phone-based Activities of Pedestrians

The intelligent vehicle community has devoted considerable efforts to model driver behavior, and in particular to detect and overcome driver distraction in an effort to reduce accidents caused by driver negligence. However, as the domain increasingly shifts towards autonomous and semi-autonomous solutions, the driver is no longer integral to the decision making process, indicating a need to refocus efforts elsewhere. To this end, we propose to study pedestrian distraction instead. In particular, we focus on detecting pedestrians who are engaged in secondary activities involving their cellphones and similar handheld multimedia devices from a purely vision-based standpoint. To achieve this objective, we propose a pipeline incorporating articulated human pose estimation, followed by a soft object label transfer from an ensemble of exemplar SVMs trained on the nearest neighbors in pose feature space. We additionally incorporate head gaze features and prior pose information to carry out cellphone related pedestrian activity recognition. Finally, we offer a method to reliably track the articulated pose of a pedestrian through a sequence of images using a particle filter with a Gaussian Process Dynamical Model (GPDM), which can then be used to estimate sequentially varying activity scores at a very low computational cost. The entire framework is fast (especially for sequential data) and accurate, and easily extensible to include other secondary activities and sources of distraction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

How would surround vehicles move? A Unified Framework for Maneuver Classification and Motion Prediction

Reliable prediction of surround vehicle motion is a critical requirement for path planning for autonomous vehicles. In this paper we propose a unified framework for surround vehicle maneuver classification and motion prediction that exploits multiple cues, namely, the estimated motion of vehicles, an understanding of typical motion patterns of freeway traffic and inter-vehicle interaction. We report our results in terms of maneuver classification accuracy and mean and median absolute error of predicted trajectories against the ground truth for real traffic data collected using vehicle mounted sensors on freeways. An ablative analysis is performed to analyze the relative importance of each cue for trajectory prediction. Additionally, an analysis of execution time for the components of the framework is presented. Finally, we present multiple case studies analyzing the outputs of our model for complex traffic scenarios

cs.CV↗