arXiv subjects

Ashis G. Banerjee

Publications and source records attributed to Ashis G. Banerjee.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Visual Object Recognition in Indoor Environments Using Topologically Persistent Features

Object recognition in unseen indoor environments remains a challenging problem for visual perception of mobile robots. In this letter, we propose the use of topologically persistent features, which rely on the objects' shape information, to address this challenge. In particular, we extract two kinds of features, namely, sparse persistence image (PI) and amplitude, by applying persistent homology to multi-directional height function-based filtrations of the cubical complexes representing the object segmentation maps. The features are then used to train a fully connected network for recognition. For performance evaluation, in addition to a widely used shape dataset and a benchmark indoor scenes dataset, we collect a new dataset, comprising scene images from two different environments, namely, a living room and a mock warehouse. The scenes are captured using varying camera poses under different illumination conditions and include up to five different objects from a given set of fourteen objects. On the benchmark indoor scenes dataset, sparse PI features show better recognition performance in unseen environments than the features learned using the widely used ResNetV2-56 and EfficientNet-B4 models. Further, they provide slightly higher recall and accuracy values than Faster R-CNN, an end-to-end object detection method, and its state-of-the-art variant, Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN. The performance of our methods also remains relatively unchanged from the training environment (living room) to the unseen environment (mock warehouse) in the new dataset. In contrast, the performance of the object detection methods drops substantially. We also implement the proposed method on a real-world robot to demonstrate its usefulness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

A Multi-Task Learning Approach for Human Activity Segmentation and Ergonomics Risk Assessment

We propose a new approach to Human Activity Evaluation (HAE) in long videos using graph-based multi-task modeling. Previous works in activity evaluation either directly compute a metric using a detected skeleton or use the scene information to regress the activity score. These approaches are insufficient for accurate activity assessment since they only compute an average score over a clip, and do not consider the correlation between the joints and body dynamics. Moreover, they are highly scene-dependent which makes the generalizability of these methods questionable. We propose a novel multi-task framework for HAE that utilizes a Graph Convolutional Network backbone to embed the interconnections between human joints in the features. In this framework, we solve the Human Activity Segmentation (HAS) problem as an auxiliary task to improve activity assessment. The HAS head is powered by an Encoder-Decoder Temporal Convolutional Network to semantically segment long videos into distinct activity classes, whereas, HAE uses a Long-Short-Term-Memory-based architecture. We evaluate our method on the UW-IOM and TUM Kitchen datasets and discuss the success and failure cases in these two datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Identifying the Influential Inputs for Network Output Variance Using Sparse Polynomial Chaos Expansion

Sensitivity analysis (SA) is an important aspect of process automation. It often aims to identify the process inputs that influence the process output's variance significantly. Existing SA approaches typically consider the input-output relationship as a black-box and conduct extensive random sampling from the actual process or its high-fidelity simulation model to identify the influential inputs. In this paper, an alternate, novel approach is proposed using a sparse polynomial chaos expansion-based model for a class of input-output relationships represented as directed acyclic networks. The model exploits the relationship structure by recursively relating a network node to its direct predecessors to trace the output variance back to the inputs. It, thereby, estimates the Sobol indices, which measure the influence of each input on the output variance, accurately and efficiently. Theoretical analysis establishes the validity of the model as the prediction of the network output converges in probability to the true output under certain regularity conditions. Empirical evaluation on two manufacturing processes shows that the model estimates the Sobol indices accurately with far fewer observations than a state-of-the-art Monte Carlo sampling method.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2019

Deep Learning-Based Semantic Segmentation of Microscale Objects

Accurate estimation of the positions and shapes of microscale objects is crucial for automated imaging-guided manipulation using a non-contact technique such as optical tweezers. Perception methods that use traditional computer vision algorithms tend to fail when the manipulation environments are crowded. In this paper, we present a deep learning model for semantic segmentation of the images representing such environments. Our model successfully performs segmentation with a high mean Intersection Over Union score of 0.91.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

An Efficient Scheduling Algorithm for Multi-Robot Task Allocation in Assembling Aircraft Structures

Efficient utilization of cooperating robots in the assembly of aircraft structures relies on balancing the workload of the robots and ensuring collision-free scheduling. We cast this problem as that of allocating a large number of repetitive assembly tasks, such as drilling holes and installing fasteners, among multiple robots. Such task allocation is often formulated as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is NP-hard, implying that computing an exactly optimal solution is computationally prohibitive for real-world applications. The problem complexity is further exacerbated by intermittent robot failures necessitating real-time task reallocation. In this letter, we present an efficient method that exploits workpart geometry and problem structure to initially generate balanced and conflict-free robot schedules under nominal conditions. Subsequently, we deal with the failures by allowing the robots to first complete their nominal schedules and then employing a market-based optimizer to allocate the leftover tasks. Results show an improvement of 11.5\% in schedule efficiency as compared to an optimized greedy multi-agent scheduler on a four robot system, which is especially promising for aircraft assembly processes that take many hours to complete. Moreover, the computation times are similar and small, typically hundreds of milliseconds.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Toward Ergonomic Risk Prediction via Segmentation of Indoor Object Manipulation Actions Using Spatiotemporal Convolutional Networks

Automated real-time prediction of the ergonomic risks of manipulating objects is a key unsolved challenge in developing effective human-robot collaboration systems for logistics and manufacturing applications. We present a foundational paradigm to address this challenge by formulating the problem as one of action segmentation from RGB-D camera videos. Spatial features are first learned using a deep convolutional model from the video frames, which are then fed sequentially to temporal convolutional networks to semantically segment the frames into a hierarchy of actions, which are either ergonomically safe, require monitoring, or need immediate attention. For performance evaluation, in addition to an open-source kitchen dataset, we collected a new dataset comprising twenty individuals picking up and placing objects of varying weights to and from cabinet and table locations at various heights. Results show very high (87-94)\% F1 overlap scores among the ground truth and predicted frame labels for videos lasting over two minutes and consisting of a large number of actions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

A Hierarchical Bayesian Linear Regression Model with Local Features for Stochastic Dynamics Approximation

One of the challenges in model-based control of stochastic dynamical systems is that the state transition dynamics are involved, and it is not easy or efficient to make good-quality predictions of the states. Moreover, there are not many representational models for the majority of autonomous systems, as it is not easy to build a compact model that captures the entire dynamical subtleties and uncertainties. In this work, we present a hierarchical Bayesian linear regression model with local features to learn the dynamics of a micro-robotic system as well as two simpler examples, consisting of a stochastic mass-spring damper and a stochastic double inverted pendulum on a cart. The model is hierarchical since we assume non-stationary priors for the model parameters. These non-stationary priors make the model more flexible by imposing priors on the priors of the model. To solve the maximum likelihood (ML) problem for this hierarchical model, we use the variational expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and enhance the procedure by introducing hidden target variables. The algorithm yields parsimonious model structures, and consistently provides fast and accurate predictions for all our examples involving large training and test sets. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the method in learning stochastic dynamics, which makes it suitable for future use in a paradigm, such as model-based reinforcement learning, to compute optimal control policies in real time.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Predicting shim gaps in aircraft assembly with machine learning and sparse sensing

A modern aircraft may require on the order of thousands of custom shims to fill gaps between structural components in the airframe that arise due to manufacturing tolerances adding up across large structures. These shims are necessary to eliminate gaps, maintain structural performance, and minimize pull-down forces required to bring the aircraft into engineering nominal configuration for peak aerodynamic efficiency. Gap filling is a time-consuming process, involving either expensive by-hand inspection or computations on vast quantities of measurement data from increasingly sophisticated metrology equipment. Either case amounts to significant delays in production, with much of the time spent in the critical path of aircraft assembly. This work presents an alternative strategy for predictive shimming, based on machine learning and sparse sensing to first learn gap distributions from historical data, and then design optimized sparse sensing strategies to streamline data collection and processing. This new approach is based on the assumption that patterns exist in shim distributions across aircraft, which may be mined and used to reduce the burden of data collection and processing in future aircraft. Specifically, robust principal component analysis is used to extract low-dimensional patterns in the gap measurements while rejecting outliers. Next, optimized sparse sensors are obtained that are most informative about the dimensions of a new aircraft in these low-dimensional principal components. We demonstrate the success of the proposed approach, called PIXel Identification Despite Uncertainty in Sensor Technology (PIXI-DUST), on historical production data from 54 representative Boeing commercial aircraft. Our algorithm successfully predicts $99\%$ of shim gaps within the desired measurement tolerance using $3\%$ of the laser scan points typically required; all results are cross-validated.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2017

Sparse-TDA: Sparse Realization of Topological Data Analysis for Multi-Way Classification

Topological data analysis (TDA) has emerged as one of the most promising techniques to reconstruct the unknown shapes of high-dimensional spaces from observed data samples. TDA, thus, yields key shape descriptors in the form of persistent topological features that can be used for any supervised or unsupervised learning task, including multi-way classification. Sparse sampling, on the other hand, provides a highly efficient technique to reconstruct signals in the spatial-temporal domain from just a few carefully-chosen samples. Here, we present a new method, referred to as the Sparse-TDA algorithm, that combines favorable aspects of the two techniques. This combination is realized by selecting an optimal set of sparse pixel samples from the persistent features generated by a vector-based TDA algorithm. These sparse samples are selected from a low-rank matrix representation of persistent features using QR pivoting. We show that the Sparse-TDA method demonstrates promising performance on three benchmark problems related to human posture recognition and image texture classification.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2017

A Note on Community Trees in Networks

We introduce the concept of community trees that summarizes topological structures within a network. A community tree is a tree structure representing clique communities from the clique percolation method (CPM). The community tree also generates a persistent diagram. Community trees and persistent diagrams reveal topological structures of the underlying networks and can be used as visualization tools. We study the stability of community trees and derive a quantity called the total star number (TSN) that presents an upper bound on the change of community trees. Our findings provide a topological interpretation for the stability of communities generated by the CPM.

stat.ML↗