arXiv subjects

Jianru Xue

Publications and source records attributed to Jianru Xue.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Enhancing Mapless Trajectory Prediction through Knowledge Distillation

Scene information plays a crucial role in trajectory forecasting systems for autonomous driving by providing semantic clues and constraints on potential future paths of traffic agents. Prevalent trajectory prediction techniques often take high-definition maps (HD maps) as part of the inputs to provide scene knowledge. Although HD maps offer accurate road information, they may suffer from the high cost of annotation or restrictions of law that limits their widespread use. Therefore, those methods are still expected to generate reliable prediction results in mapless scenarios. In this paper, we tackle the problem of improving the consistency of multi-modal prediction trajectories and the real road topology when map information is unavailable during the test phase. Specifically, we achieve this by training a map-based prediction teacher network on the annotated samples and transferring the knowledge to a student mapless prediction network using a two-fold knowledge distillation framework. Our solution is generalizable for common trajectory prediction networks and does not bring extra computation burden. Experimental results show that our method stably improves prediction performance in mapless mode on many widely used state-of-the-art trajectory prediction baselines, compensating for the gaps caused by the absence of HD maps. Qualitative visualization results demonstrate that our approach helps infer unseen map information.

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arXiv2023

Cognitive Accident Prediction in Driving Scenes: A Multimodality Benchmark

Traffic accident prediction in driving videos aims to provide an early warning of the accident occurrence, and supports the decision making of safe driving systems. Previous works usually concentrate on the spatial-temporal correlation of object-level context, while they do not fit the inherent long-tailed data distribution well and are vulnerable to severe environmental change. In this work, we propose a Cognitive Accident Prediction (CAP) method that explicitly leverages human-inspired cognition of text description on the visual observation and the driver attention to facilitate model training. In particular, the text description provides a dense semantic description guidance for the primary context of the traffic scene, while the driver attention provides a traction to focus on the critical region closely correlating with safe driving. CAP is formulated by an attentive text-to-vision shift fusion module, an attentive scene context transfer module, and the driver attention guided accident prediction module. We leverage the attention mechanism in these modules to explore the core semantic cues for accident prediction. In order to train CAP, we extend an existing self-collected DADA-2000 dataset (with annotated driver attention for each frame) with further factual text descriptions for the visual observations before the accidents. Besides, we construct a new large-scale benchmark consisting of 11,727 in-the-wild accident videos with over 2.19 million frames (named as CAP-DATA) together with labeled fact-effect-reason-introspection description and temporal accident frame label. Based on extensive experiments, the superiority of CAP is validated compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The code, CAP-DATA, and all results will be released in \url{https://github.com/JWFanggit/LOTVS-CAP}.

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arXiv2023

Learning Residual Model of Model Predictive Control via Random Forests for Autonomous Driving

One major issue in learning-based model predictive control (MPC) for autonomous driving is the contradiction between the system model's prediction accuracy and computation efficiency. The more situations a system model covers, the more complex it is, along with highly nonlinear and nonconvex properties. These issues make the optimization too complicated to solve and render real-time control impractical.To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical learning residual model which leverages random forests and linear regression.The learned model consists of two levels. The low level uses linear regression to fit the residues, and the high level uses random forests to switch different linear models. Meanwhile, we adopt the linear dynamic bicycle model with error states as the nominal model.The switched linear regression model is added to the nominal model to form the system model. It reformulates the learning-based MPC as a quadratic program (QP) problem and optimization solvers can effectively solve it. Experimental path tracking results show that the driving vehicle's prediction accuracy and tracking accuracy are significantly improved compared with the nominal MPC.Compared with the state-of-the-art Gaussian process-based nonlinear model predictive control (GP-NMPC), our method gets better performance on tracking accuracy while maintaining a lower computation consumption.

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arXiv2023

UAV Obstacle Avoidance by Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement in Arbitrary 3D Environment

This paper focuses on the continuous control of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on a deep reinforcement learning method for a large-scale 3D complex environment. The purpose is to make the UAV reach any target point from a certain starting point, and the flying height and speed are variable during navigation. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based method combined with human-in-the-loop, which allows the UAV to avoid obstacles automatically during flying. We design multiple reward functions based on the relevant domain knowledge to guide UAV navigation. The role of human-in-the-loop is to dynamically change the reward function of the UAV in different situations to suit the obstacle avoidance of the UAV better. We verify the success rate and average step size on urban, rural, and forest scenarios, and the experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the training convergence time and improve the efficiency and accuracy of navigation tasks. The code is available on the website https://github.com/Monnalo/UAV_navigation.

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arXiv2023

FEND: A Future Enhanced Distribution-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Long-tail Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the future trajectories of the traffic agents is a gordian technique in autonomous driving. However, trajectory prediction suffers from data imbalance in the prevalent datasets, and the tailed data is often more complicated and safety-critical. In this paper, we focus on dealing with the long-tail phenomenon in trajectory prediction. Previous methods dealing with long-tail data did not take into account the variety of motion patterns in the tailed data. In this paper, we put forward a future enhanced contrastive learning framework to recognize tail trajectory patterns and form a feature space with separate pattern clusters. Furthermore, a distribution aware hyper predictor is brought up to better utilize the shaped feature space. Our method is a model-agnostic framework and can be plugged into many well-known baselines. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art long-tail prediction method on tailed samples by 9.5% on ADE and 8.5% on FDE, while maintaining or slightly improving the averaged performance. Our method also surpasses many long-tail techniques on trajectory prediction task.

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arXiv2023

DADA: Driver Attention Prediction in Driving Accident Scenarios

Driver attention prediction is becoming an essential research problem in human-like driving systems. This work makes an attempt to predict the driver attention in driving accident scenarios (DADA). However, challenges tread on the heels of that because of the dynamic traffic scene, intricate and imbalanced accident categories. In this work, we design a semantic context induced attentive fusion network (SCAFNet). We first segment the RGB video frames into the images with different semantic regions (i.e., semantic images), where each region denotes one kind of semantic categories of the scene (e.g., road, trees, etc.), and learn the spatio-temporal features of RGB frames and semantic images in two parallel paths simultaneously. Then, the learned features are fused by an attentive fusion network to find the semantic-induced scene variation in driver attention prediction. The contributions are three folds. 1) With the semantic images, we introduce their semantic context features and verified the manifest promotion effect for helping the driver attention prediction, where the semantic context features are modeled by a graph convolution network (GCN) on semantic images; 2) We fuse the semantic context features of semantic images and the features of RGB frames in an attentive strategy, and the fused details are transferred over frames by a convolutional LSTM module to obtain the attention map of each video frame with the consideration of historical scene variation in driving situations; 3) The superiority of the proposed method is evaluated on our previously collected dataset (named as DADA-2000) and two other challenging datasets with state-of-the-art methods. DADA-2000 is available at https://github.com/JWFangit/LOTVS-DADA.

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arXiv2022

Deep Virtual-to-Real Distillation for Pedestrian Crossing Prediction

Pedestrian crossing is one of the most typical behavior which conflicts with natural driving behavior of vehicles. Consequently, pedestrian crossing prediction is one of the primary task that influences the vehicle planning for safe driving. However, current methods that rely on the practically collected data in real driving scenes cannot depict and cover all kinds of scene condition in real traffic world. To this end, we formulate a deep virtual to real distillation framework by introducing the synthetic data that can be generated conveniently, and borrow the abundant information of pedestrian movement in synthetic videos for the pedestrian crossing prediction in real data with a simple and lightweight implementation. In order to verify this framework, we construct a benchmark with 4667 virtual videos owning about 745k frames (called Virtual-PedCross-4667), and evaluate the proposed method on two challenging datasets collected in real driving situations, i.e., JAAD and PIE datasets. State-of-the-art performance of this framework is demonstrated by exhaustive experiment analysis. The dataset and code can be downloaded from the website \url{http://www.lotvs.net/code_data/}.

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arXiv2022

Using Detection, Tracking and Prediction in Visual SLAM to Achieve Real-time Semantic Mapping of Dynamic Scenarios

In this paper, we propose a lightweight system, RDS-SLAM, based on ORB-SLAM2, which can accurately estimate poses and build semantic maps at object level for dynamic scenarios in real time using only one commonly used Intel Core i7 CPU. In RDS-SLAM, three major improvements, as well as major architectural modifications, are proposed to overcome the limitations of ORB-SLAM2. Firstly, it adopts a lightweight object detection neural network in key frames. Secondly, an efficient tracking and prediction mechanism is embedded into the system to remove the feature points belonging to movable objects in all incoming frames. Thirdly, a semantic octree map is built by probabilistic fusion of detection and tracking results, which enables a robot to maintain a semantic description at object level for potential interactions in dynamic scenarios. We evaluate RDS-SLAM in TUM RGB-D dataset, and experimental results show that RDS-SLAM can run with 30.3 ms per frame in dynamic scenarios using only an Intel Core i7 CPU, and achieves comparable accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art SLAM systems which heavily rely on both Intel Core i7 CPUs and powerful GPUs.

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arXiv2022

Sparse Semantic Map-Based Monocular Localization in Traffic Scenes Using Learned 2D-3D Point-Line Correspondences

Vision-based localization in a prior map is of crucial importance for autonomous vehicles. Given a query image, the goal is to estimate the camera pose corresponding to the prior map, and the key is the registration problem of camera images within the map. While autonomous vehicles drive on the road under occlusion (e.g., car, bus, truck) and changing environment appearance (e.g., illumination changes, seasonal variation), existing approaches rely heavily on dense point descriptors at the feature level to solve the registration problem, entangling features with appearance and occlusion. As a result, they often fail to estimate the correct poses. To address these issues, we propose a sparse semantic map-based monocular localization method, which solves 2D-3D registration via a well-designed deep neural network. Given a sparse semantic map that consists of simplified elements (e.g., pole lines, traffic sign midpoints) with multiple semantic labels, the camera pose is then estimated by learning the corresponding features between the 2D semantic elements from the image and the 3D elements from the sparse semantic map. The proposed sparse semantic map-based localization approach is robust against occlusion and long-term appearance changes in the environments. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2022

Trajectory Forecasting from Detection with Uncertainty-Aware Motion Encoding

Trajectory forecasting is critical for autonomous platforms to make safe planning and actions. Currently, most trajectory forecasting methods assume that object trajectories have been extracted and directly develop trajectory predictors based on the ground truth trajectories. However, this assumption does not hold in practical situations. Trajectories obtained from object detection and tracking are inevitably noisy, which could cause serious forecasting errors to predictors built on ground truth trajectories. In this paper, we propose a trajectory predictor directly based on detection results without relying on explicitly formed trajectories. Different from the traditional methods which encode the motion cue of an agent based on its clearly defined trajectory, we extract the motion information only based on the affinity cues among detection results, in which an affinity-aware state update mechanism is designed to take the uncertainty of association into account. In addition, considering that there could be multiple plausible matching candidates, we aggregate the states of them. This design relaxes the undesirable effect of noisy trajectory obtained from data association. Extensive ablation experiments validate the effectiveness of our method and its generalization ability on different detectors. Cross-comparison to other forecasting schemes further proves the superiority of our method. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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arXiv2021

Multi-Scale Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition

Skeleton data is of low dimension. However, there is a trend of using very deep and complicated feedforward neural networks to model the skeleton sequence without considering the complexity in recent year. In this paper, a simple yet effective multi-scale semantics-guided neural network (MS-SGN) is proposed for skeleton-based action recognition. We explicitly introduce the high level semantics of joints (joint type and frame index) into the network to enhance the feature representation capability of joints. Moreover, a multi-scale strategy is proposed to be robust to the temporal scale variations. In addition, we exploit the relationship of joints hierarchically through two modules, i.e., a joint-level module for modeling the correlations of joints in the same frame and a frame-level module for modeling the temporal dependencies of frames. With an order of magnitude smaller model size than most previous methods, MSSGN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the NTU60, NTU120, and SYSU datasets.

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arXiv2020

Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition

Skeleton-based human action recognition has attracted great interest thanks to the easy accessibility of the human skeleton data. Recently, there is a trend of using very deep feedforward neural networks to model the 3D coordinates of joints without considering the computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective semantics-guided neural network (SGN) for skeleton-based action recognition. We explicitly introduce the high level semantics of joints (joint type and frame index) into the network to enhance the feature representation capability. In addition, we exploit the relationship of joints hierarchically through two modules, i.e., a joint-level module for modeling the correlations of joints in the same frame and a framelevel module for modeling the dependencies of frames by taking the joints in the same frame as a whole. A strong baseline is proposed to facilitate the study of this field. With an order of magnitude smaller model size than most previous works, SGN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the NTU60, NTU120, and SYSU datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SGN.

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arXiv2020

DCDLearn: Multi-order Deep Cross-distance Learning for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) has become a popular research topic owing to its practicability in intelligent transportation systems. Vehicle Re-ID suffers the numerous challenges caused by drastic variation in illumination, occlusions, background, resolutions, viewing angles, and so on. To address it, this paper formulates a multi-order deep cross-distance learning (\textbf{DCDLearn}) model for vehicle re-identification, where an efficient one-view CycleGAN model is developed to alleviate exhaustive and enumerative cross-camera matching problem in previous works and smooth the domain discrepancy of cross cameras. Specially, we treat the transferred images and the reconstructed images generated by one-view CycleGAN as multi-order augmented data for deep cross-distance learning, where the cross distances of multi-order image set with distinct identities are learned by optimizing an objective function with multi-order augmented triplet loss and center loss to achieve the camera-invariance and identity-consistency. Extensive experiments on three vehicle Re-ID datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-arts, especially for the small scale dataset.

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arXiv2019

View Adaptive Neural Networks for High Performance Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Skeleton-based human action recognition has recently attracted increasing attention thanks to the accessibility and the popularity of 3D skeleton data. One of the key challenges in skeleton-based action recognition lies in the large view variations when capturing data. In order to alleviate the effects of view variations, this paper introduces a novel view adaptation scheme, which automatically determines the virtual observation viewpoints in a learning based data driven manner. We design two view adaptive neural networks, i.e., VA-RNN based on RNN, and VA-CNN based on CNN. For each network, a novel view adaptation module learns and determines the most suitable observation viewpoints, and transforms the skeletons to those viewpoints for the end-to-end recognition with a main classification network. Ablation studies find that the proposed view adaptive models are capable of transforming the skeletons of various viewpoints to much more consistent virtual viewpoints which largely eliminates the viewpoint influence. In addition, we design a two-stream scheme (referred to as VA-fusion) that fuses the scores of the two networks to provide the fused prediction. Extensive experimental evaluations on five challenging benchmarks demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed view-adaptive networks and superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/View-Adaptive-Neural-Networks-for-Skeleton-based-Human-Action-Recognition.

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arXiv2019

EleAtt-RNN: Adding Attentiveness to Neurons in Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are capable of modeling temporal dependencies of complex sequential data. In general, current available structures of RNNs tend to concentrate on controlling the contributions of current and previous information. However, the exploration of different importance levels of different elements within an input vector is always ignored. We propose a simple yet effective Element-wise-Attention Gate (EleAttG), which can be easily added to an RNN block (e.g. all RNN neurons in an RNN layer), to empower the RNN neurons to have attentiveness capability. For an RNN block, an EleAttG is used for adaptively modulating the input by assigning different levels of importance, i.e., attention, to each element/dimension of the input. We refer to an RNN block equipped with an EleAttG as an EleAtt-RNN block. Instead of modulating the input as a whole, the EleAttG modulates the input at fine granularity, i.e., element-wise, and the modulation is content adaptive. The proposed EleAttG, as an additional fundamental unit, is general and can be applied to any RNN structures, e.g., standard RNN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), or Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EleAtt-RNN by applying it to different tasks including the action recognition, from both skeleton-based data and RGB videos, gesture recognition, and sequential MNIST classification. Experiments show that adding attentiveness through EleAttGs to RNN blocks significantly improves the power of RNNs.

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arXiv2019

DADA-2000: Can Driving Accident be Predicted by Driver Attention? Analyzed by A Benchmark

Driver attention prediction is currently becoming the focus in safe driving research community, such as the DR(eye)VE project and newly emerged Berkeley DeepDrive Attention (BDD-A) database in critical situations. In safe driving, an essential task is to predict the incoming accidents as early as possible. BDD-A was aware of this problem and collected the driver attention in laboratory because of the rarity of such scenes. Nevertheless, BDD-A focuses the critical situations which do not encounter actual accidents, and just faces the driver attention prediction task, without a close step for accident prediction. In contrast to this, we explore the view of drivers' eyes for capturing multiple kinds of accidents, and construct a more diverse and larger video benchmark than ever before with the driver attention and the driving accident annotation simultaneously (named as DADA-2000), which has 2000 video clips owning about 658,476 frames on 54 kinds of accidents. These clips are crowd-sourced and captured in various occasions (highway, urban, rural, and tunnel), weather (sunny, rainy and snowy) and light conditions (daytime and nighttime). For the driver attention representation, we collect the maps of fixations, saccade scan path and focusing time. The accidents are annotated by their categories, the accident window in clips and spatial locations of the crash-objects. Based on the analysis, we obtain a quantitative and positive answer for the question in this paper.

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arXiv2019

BLVD: Building A Large-scale 5D Semantics Benchmark for Autonomous Driving

In autonomous driving community, numerous benchmarks have been established to assist the tasks of 3D/2D object detection, stereo vision, semantic/instance segmentation. However, the more meaningful dynamic evolution of the surrounding objects of ego-vehicle is rarely exploited, and lacks a large-scale dataset platform. To address this, we introduce BLVD, a large-scale 5D semantics benchmark which does not concentrate on the static detection or semantic/instance segmentation tasks tackled adequately before. Instead, BLVD aims to provide a platform for the tasks of dynamic 4D (3D+temporal) tracking, 5D (4D+interactive) interactive event recognition and intention prediction. This benchmark will boost the deeper understanding of traffic scenes than ever before. We totally yield 249,129 3D annotations, 4,902 independent individuals for tracking with the length of overall 214,922 points, 6,004 valid fragments for 5D interactive event recognition, and 4,900 individuals for 5D intention prediction. These tasks are contained in four kinds of scenarios depending on the object density (low and high) and light conditions (daytime and nighttime). The benchmark can be downloaded from our project site https://github.com/VCCIV/BLVD/.

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arXiv2019

SR-LSTM: State Refinement for LSTM towards Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

In crowd scenarios, reliable trajectory prediction of pedestrians requires insightful understanding of their social behaviors. These behaviors have been well investigated by plenty of studies, while it is hard to be fully expressed by hand-craft rules. Recent studies based on LSTM networks have shown great ability to learn social behaviors. However, many of these methods rely on previous neighboring hidden states but ignore the important current intention of the neighbors. In order to address this issue, we propose a data-driven state refinement module for LSTM network (SR-LSTM), which activates the utilization of the current intention of neighbors, and jointly and iteratively refines the current states of all participants in the crowd through a message passing mechanism. To effectively extract the social effect of neighbors, we further introduce a social-aware information selection mechanism consisting of an element-wise motion gate and a pedestrian-wise attention to select useful message from neighboring pedestrians. Experimental results on two public datasets, i.e. ETH and UCY, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SR-LSTM and we achieves state-of-the-art results.

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