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Guoyang Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Guoyang Zhao.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Erase, then Redraw: A Novel Data Augmentation Approach for Free Space Detection Using Diffusion Model

Data augmentation is one of the most common tools in deep learning, underpinning many recent advances including tasks such as classification, detection, and semantic segmentation. The standard approach to data augmentation involves simple transformations like rotation and flipping to generate new images. However, these new images often lack diversity along the main semantic dimensions within the data. Traditional data augmentation methods cannot alter high-level semantic attributes such as the presence of vehicles, trees, and buildings in a scene to enhance data diversity. In recent years, the rapid development of generative models has injected new vitality into the field of data augmentation. In this paper, we address the lack of diversity in data augmentation for road detection task by using a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to parameterize image-to-image transformations. Our method involves editing images using these diffusion models to change their semantics. In essence, we achieve this goal by erasing instances of real objects from the original dataset and generating new instances with similar semantics in the erased regions using the diffusion model, thereby expanding the original dataset. We evaluate our approach on the KITTI road dataset and achieve the best results compared to other data augmentation methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed development.

cs.CV↗

Motion-Coupled Mapping Algorithm for Hybrid Rice Canopy

This paper presents a motion-coupled mapping algorithm for contour mapping of hybrid rice canopies, specifically designed for Agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles (Agri-UGV) navigating complex and unknown rice fields. Precise canopy mapping is essential for Agri-UGVs to plan efficient routes and avoid protected zones. The motion control of Agri-UGVs, tasked with impurity removal and other operations, depends heavily on accurate estimation of rice canopy height and structure. To achieve this, the proposed algorithm integrates real-time RGB-D sensor data with kinematic and inertial measurements, enabling efficient mapping and proprioceptive localization. The algorithm produces grid-based elevation maps that reflect the probabilistic distribution of canopy contours, accounting for motion-induced uncertainties. It is implemented on a high-clearance Agri-UGV platform and tested in various environments, including both controlled and dynamic rice field settings. This approach significantly enhances the mapping accuracy and operational reliability of Agri-UGVs, contributing to more efficient autonomous agricultural operations.

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CurbNet: Curb Detection Framework Based on LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation

Curb detection is a crucial function in intelligent driving, essential for determining drivable areas on the road. However, the complexity of road environments makes curb detection challenging. This paper introduces CurbNet, a novel framework for curb detection utilizing point cloud segmentation. To address the lack of comprehensive curb datasets with 3D annotations, we have developed the 3D-Curb dataset based on SemanticKITTI, currently the largest and most diverse collection of curb point clouds. Recognizing that the primary characteristic of curbs is height variation, our approach leverages spatially rich 3D point clouds for training. To tackle the challenges posed by the uneven distribution of curb features on the xy-plane and their dependence on high-frequency features along the z-axis, we introduce the Multi-Scale and Channel Attention (MSCA) module, a customized solution designed to optimize detection performance. Additionally, we propose an adaptive weighted loss function group specifically formulated to counteract the imbalance in the distribution of curb point clouds relative to other categories. Extensive experiments conducted on 2 major datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses existing benchmarks set by leading curb detection and point cloud segmentation models. Through the post-processing refinement of the detection results, we have significantly reduced noise in curb detection, thereby improving precision by 4.5 points. Similarly, our tolerance experiments also achieve state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, real-world experiments and dataset analyses mutually validate each other, reinforcing CurbNet's superior detection capability and robust generalizability. The project website is available at: https://github.com/guoyangzhao/CurbNet/.

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Monocular 3D lane detection for Autonomous Driving: Recent Achievements, Challenges, and Outlooks

3D lane detection is essential in autonomous driving as it extracts structural and traffic information from the road in three-dimensional space, aiding self-driving cars in logical, safe, and comfortable path planning and motion control. Given the cost of sensors and the advantages of visual data in color information, 3D lane detection based on monocular vision is an important research direction in the realm of autonomous driving, increasingly gaining attention in both industry and academia. Regrettably, recent advancements in visual perception seem inadequate for the development of fully reliable 3D lane detection algorithms, which also hampers the progress of vision-based fully autonomous vehicles. We believe that there is still considerable room for improvement in 3D lane detection algorithms for autonomous vehicles using visual sensors, and significant enhancements are needed. This review looks back and analyzes the current state of achievements in the field of 3D lane detection research. It covers all current monocular-based 3D lane detection processes, discusses the performance of these cutting-edge algorithms, analyzes the time complexity of various algorithms, and highlights the main achievements and limitations of ongoing research efforts. The survey also includes a comprehensive discussion of available 3D lane detection datasets and the challenges that researchers face but have not yet resolved. Finally, our work outlines future research directions and invites researchers and practitioners to join this exciting field.

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Task-Oriented Pre-Training for Drivable Area Detection

Pre-training techniques play a crucial role in deep learning, enhancing models' performance across a variety of tasks. By initially training on large datasets and subsequently fine-tuning on task-specific data, pre-training provides a solid foundation for models, improving generalization abilities and accelerating convergence rates. This approach has seen significant success in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. However, traditional pre-training methods necessitate large datasets and substantial computational resources, and they can only learn shared features through prolonged training and struggle to capture deeper, task-specific features. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented pre-training method that begins with generating redundant segmentation proposals using the Segment Anything (SAM) model. We then introduce a Specific Category Enhancement Fine-tuning (SCEF) strategy for fine-tuning the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to select proposals most closely related to the drivable area from those generated by SAM. This approach can generate a lot of coarse training data for pre-training models, which are further fine-tuned using manually annotated data, thereby improving model's performance. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the KITTI road dataset demonstrate that our task-oriented pre-training method achieves an all-around performance improvement compared to models without pre-training. Moreover, our pre-training method not only surpasses traditional pre-training approach but also achieves the best performance compared to state-of-the-art self-training methods.

cs.CV↗

OmniColor: A Global Camera Pose Optimization Approach of LiDAR-360Camera Fusion for Colorizing Point Clouds

A Colored point cloud, as a simple and efficient 3D representation, has many advantages in various fields, including robotic navigation and scene reconstruction. This representation is now commonly used in 3D reconstruction tasks relying on cameras and LiDARs. However, fusing data from these two types of sensors is poorly performed in many existing frameworks, leading to unsatisfactory mapping results, mainly due to inaccurate camera poses. This paper presents OmniColor, a novel and efficient algorithm to colorize point clouds using an independent 360-degree camera. Given a LiDAR-based point cloud and a sequence of panorama images with initial coarse camera poses, our objective is to jointly optimize the poses of all frames for mapping images onto geometric reconstructions. Our pipeline works in an off-the-shelf manner that does not require any feature extraction or matching process. Instead, we find optimal poses by directly maximizing the photometric consistency of LiDAR maps. In experiments, we show that our method can overcome the severe visual distortion of omnidirectional images and greatly benefit from the wide field of view (FOV) of 360-degree cameras to reconstruct various scenarios with accuracy and stability. The code will be released at https://github.com/liubonan123/OmniColor/.

cs.CV↗

Every Dataset Counts: Scaling up Monocular 3D Object Detection with Joint Datasets Training

Monocular 3D object detection plays a crucial role in autonomous driving. However, existing monocular 3D detection algorithms depend on 3D labels derived from LiDAR measurements, which are costly to acquire for new datasets and challenging to deploy in novel environments. Specifically, this study investigates the pipeline for training a monocular 3D object detection model on a diverse collection of 3D and 2D datasets. The proposed framework comprises three components: (1) a robust monocular 3D model capable of functioning across various camera settings, (2) a selective-training strategy to accommodate datasets with differing class annotations, and (3) a pseudo 3D training approach using 2D labels to enhance detection performance in scenes containing only 2D labels. With this framework, we could train models on a joint set of various open 3D/2D datasets to obtain models with significantly stronger generalization capability and enhanced performance on new dataset with only 2D labels. We conduct extensive experiments on KITTI/nuScenes/ONCE/Cityscapes/BDD100K datasets to demonstrate the scaling ability of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

CLRKDNet: Speeding up Lane Detection with Knowledge Distillation

Road lanes are integral components of the visual perception systems in intelligent vehicles, playing a pivotal role in safe navigation. In lane detection tasks, balancing accuracy with real-time performance is essential, yet existing methods often sacrifice one for the other. To address this trade-off, we introduce CLRKDNet, a streamlined model that balances detection accuracy with real-time performance. The state-of-the-art model CLRNet has demonstrated exceptional performance across various datasets, yet its computational overhead is substantial due to its Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and muti-layer detection head architecture. Our method simplifies both the FPN structure and detection heads, redesigning them to incorporate a novel teacher-student distillation process alongside a newly introduced series of distillation losses. This combination reduces inference time by up to 60% while maintaining detection accuracy comparable to CLRNet. This strategic balance of accuracy and speed makes CLRKDNet a viable solution for real-time lane detection tasks in autonomous driving applications.

cs.CV↗

Test-Time Adaptation for Nighttime Color-Thermal Semantic Segmentation

The ability to scene understanding in adverse visual conditions, e.g., nighttime, has sparked active research for RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation. However, it is essentially hampered by two critical problems: 1) the day-night gap of RGB images is larger than that of thermal images, and 2) the class-wise performance of RGB images at night is not consistently higher or lower than that of thermal images. we propose the first test-time adaptation (TTA) framework, dubbed Night-TTA, to address the problems for nighttime RGBT semantic segmentation without access to the source (daytime) data during adaptation. Our method enjoys three key technical parts. Firstly, as one modality (e.g., RGB) suffers from a larger domain gap than that of the other (e.g., thermal), Imaging Heterogeneity Refinement (IHR) employs an interaction branch on the basis of RGB and thermal branches to prevent cross-modal discrepancy and performance degradation. Then, Class Aware Refinement (CAR) is introduced to obtain reliable ensemble logits based on pixel-level distribution aggregation of the three branches. In addition, we also design a specific learning scheme for our TTA framework, which enables the ensemble logits and three student logits to collaboratively learn to improve the quality of predictions during the testing phase of our Night TTA. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance with a 13.07% boost in mIoU.

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