arXiv subjects

John Gauch

Publications and source records attributed to John Gauch.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Bayer: Task-Optimal Sensor Co-Design for Robust Autonomous-Driving Segmentation

Robust perception underpins autonomous driving, and most recent progress comes from scaling the model-larger backbones, foundation models, and cooperative multi-agent fusion. We pursue a complementary, upstream question: what should the camera itself measure? Using a differentiable RAW-to-task pipeline, we decompose which sensor degrees of freedom benefit dense prediction. Learning the spectral colour-filter-array (CFA) weights is the dominant lever, improving mIoU by +0.017 (KITTI-360) and +0.023 (ACDC) over a fixed camera. In contrast, point-spread-function (optics) co-design is net-negative (-0.020 mIoU on KITTI-360) - a consequence of the data-processing inequality, which also bounds the task information that any downstream model, however large or cooperative, can recover. Noise co-optimisation is marginal, and counter to intuition enlarging the CFA tile beyond 2x2 consistently hurts, as the filters are confined to the rank three sRGB input. Because the intervention is at the sensor, the gains are model-agnostic; we validate robustness on ACDC's fog, night, rain, and snow, and conclude with a simple recipe: learn the 2x2 CFA weights and keep an identity PSF.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Sense for Driving: Joint Optics-Sensor-Model Co-Design for Semantic Segmentation

Traditional autonomous driving pipelines decouple camera design from downstream perception, relying on fixed optics and handcrafted ISPs that prioritize human viewable imagery rather than machine semantics. This separation discards information during demosaicing, denoising, or quantization, while forcing models to adapt to sensor artifacts. We present a task-driven co-design framework that unifies optics, sensor modeling, and lightweight semantic segmentation networks into a single end-to-end RAW-to-task pipeline. Building on DeepLens[19], our system integrates realistic cellphone-scale lens models, learnable color filter arrays, Poisson-Gaussian noise processes, and quantization, all optimized directly for segmentation objectives. Evaluations on KITTI-360 show consistent mIoU improvements over fixed pipelines, with optics modeling and CFA learning providing the largest gains, especially for thin or low-light-sensitive classes. Importantly, these robustness gains are achieved with a compact ~1M-parameter model running at ~28 FPS, demonstrating edge deployability. Visual and quantitative analyses further highlight how co-designed sensors adapt acquisition to semantic structure, sharpening boundaries and maintaining accuracy under blur, noise, and low bit-depth. Together, these findings establish full-stack co-optimization of optics, sensors, and networks as a principled path toward efficient, reliable, and deployable perception in autonomous systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TinyBEV: Cross Modal Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi Task Bird's Eye View Perception and Planning

We present TinyBEV, a unified, camera only Bird's Eye View (BEV) framework that distills the full-stack capabilities of a large planning-oriented teacher (UniAD [19]) into a compact, real-time student model. Unlike prior efficient camera only baselines such as VAD[23] and VADv2[7], TinyBEV supports the complete autonomy stack 3D detection, HD-map segmentation, motion forecasting, occupancy prediction, and goal-directed planning within a streamlined 28M-parameter backbone, achieving a 78% reduction in parameters over UniAD [19]. Our model-agnostic, multi-stage distillation strategy combines feature-level, output-level, and adaptive region-aware supervision to effectively transfer high-capacity multi-modal knowledge to a lightweight BEV representation. On nuScenes[4], Tiny-BEV achieves 39.0 mAP for detection, 1.08 minADE for motion forecasting, and a 0.32 collision rate, while running 5x faster (11 FPS) and requiring only camera input. These results demonstrate that full-stack driving intelligence can be retained in resource-constrained settings, bridging the gap between large-scale, multi-modal perception-planning models and deployment-ready real-time autonomy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Adaptive Extensions of Unbiased Risk Estimators for Unsupervised Magnetic Resonance Image Denoising

The application of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to image denoising has notably challenged traditional denoising methods, particularly within complex noise scenarios prevalent in medical imaging. Despite the effectiveness of traditional and some DNN-based methods, their reliance on high-quality, noiseless ground truth images limits their practical utility. In response to this, our work introduces and benchmarks innovative unsupervised learning strategies, notably Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE), its extension (eSURE), and our novel implementation, the Extended Poisson Unbiased Risk Estimator (ePURE), within medical imaging frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of these methods on MRI data afflicted with Gaussian and Poisson noise types, a scenario typical in medical imaging but challenging for most denoising algorithms. Our main contribution lies in the effective adaptation and implementation of the SURE, eSURE, and particularly the ePURE frameworks for medical images, showcasing their robustness and efficacy in environments where traditional noiseless ground truth cannot be obtained.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

OrthoNets: Orthogonal Channel Attention Networks

Designing an effective channel attention mechanism implores one to find a lossy-compression method allowing for optimal feature representation. Despite recent progress in the area, it remains an open problem. FcaNet, the current state-of-the-art channel attention mechanism, attempted to find such an information-rich compression using Discrete Cosine Transforms (DCTs). One drawback of FcaNet is that there is no natural choice of the DCT frequencies. To circumvent this issue, FcaNet experimented on ImageNet to find optimal frequencies. We hypothesize that the choice of frequency plays only a supporting role and the primary driving force for the effectiveness of their attention filters is the orthogonality of the DCT kernels. To test this hypothesis, we construct an attention mechanism using randomly initialized orthogonal filters. Integrating this mechanism into ResNet, we create OrthoNet. We compare OrthoNet to FcaNet (and other attention mechanisms) on Birds, MS-COCO, and Places356 and show superior performance. On the ImageNet dataset, our method competes with or surpasses the current state-of-the-art. Our results imply that an optimal choice of filter is elusive and generalization can be achieved with a sufficiently large number of orthogonal filters. We further investigate other general principles for implementing channel attention, such as its position in the network and channel groupings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hady1011/OrthoNets/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

UTOPIA: Unconstrained Tracking Objects without Preliminary Examination via Cross-Domain Adaptation

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) aims to find bounding boxes and identities of targeted objects in consecutive video frames. While fully-supervised MOT methods have achieved high accuracy on existing datasets, they cannot generalize well on a newly obtained dataset or a new unseen domain. In this work, we first address the MOT problem from the cross-domain point of view, imitating the process of new data acquisition in practice. Then, a new cross-domain MOT adaptation from existing datasets is proposed without any pre-defined human knowledge in understanding and modeling objects. It can also learn and update itself from the target data feedback. The intensive experiments are designed on four challenging settings, including MOTSynth to MOT17, MOT17 to MOT20, MOT17 to VisDrone, and MOT17 to DanceTrack. We then prove the adaptability of the proposed self-supervised learning strategy. The experiments also show superior performance on tracking metrics MOTA and IDF1, compared to fully supervised, unsupervised, and self-supervised state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗