arXiv subjects

Rudolf Mester

Publications and source records attributed to Rudolf Mester.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Simulated Autonomous Driving in a Realistic Driving Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning and a Deterministic Finite State Machine

In the field of Autonomous Driving, the system controlling the vehicle can be seen as an agent acting in a complex environment and thus naturally fits into the modern framework of Reinforcement Learning. However, learning to drive can be a challenging task and current results are often restricted to simplified driving environments. To advance the field, we present a method to adaptively restrict the action space of the agent according to its current driving situation and show that it can be used to swiftly learn to drive in a realistic environment based on the Deep Q-Network algorithm.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Simulated Autonomous Driving on Realistic Road Networks using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) can be a promising approach to handle various tasks in the field of (simulated) autonomous driving. However, recent publications mainly consider learning in unusual driving environments. This paper presents Driving School for Autonomous Agents (DSA^2), a software for validating DRL algorithms in more usual driving environments based on artificial and realistic road networks. We also present the results of applying DSA^2 for handling the task of driving on a straight road while regulating the velocity of one vehicle according to different speed limits.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2017

Learning Rank Reduced Interpolation with Principal Component Analysis

In computer vision most iterative optimization algorithms, both sparse and dense, rely on a coarse and reliable dense initialization to bootstrap their optimization procedure. For example, dense optical flow algorithms profit massively in speed and robustness if they are initialized well in the basin of convergence of the used loss function. The same holds true for methods as sparse feature tracking when initial flow or depth information for new features at arbitrary positions is needed. This makes it extremely important to have techniques at hand that allow to obtain from only very few available measurements a dense but still approximative sketch of a desired 2D structure (e.g. depth maps, optical flow, disparity maps, etc.). The 2D map is regarded as sample from a 2D random process. The method presented here exploits the complete information given by the principal component analysis (PCA) of that process, the principal basis and its prior distribution. The method is able to determine a dense reconstruction from sparse measurement. When facing situations with only very sparse measurements, typically the number of principal components is further reduced which results in a loss of expressiveness of the basis. We overcome this problem and inject prior knowledge in a maximum a posterior (MAP) approach. We test our approach on the KITTI and the virtual KITTI datasets and focus on the interpolation of depth maps for driving scenes. The evaluation of the results show good agreement to the ground truth and are clearly better than results of interpolation by the nearest neighbor method which disregards statistical information.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Joint Epipolar Tracking (JET): Simultaneous optimization of epipolar geometry and feature correspondences

Traditionally, pose estimation is considered as a two step problem. First, feature correspondences are determined by direct comparison of image patches, or by associating feature descriptors. In a second step, the relative pose and the coordinates of corresponding points are estimated, most often by minimizing the reprojection error (RPE). RPE optimization is based on a loss function that is merely aware of the feature pixel positions but not of the underlying image intensities. In this paper, we propose a sparse direct method which introduces a loss function that allows to simultaneously optimize the unscaled relative pose, as well as the set of feature correspondences directly considering the image intensity values. Furthermore, we show how to integrate statistical prior information on the motion into the optimization process. This constructive inclusion of a Bayesian bias term is particularly efficient in application cases with a strongly predictable (short term) dynamic, e.g. in a driving scenario. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the JET algorithm we propose outperforms the classical reprojection error optimization on two synthetic datasets and on the KITTI dataset. The JET algorithm runs in real-time on a single CPU thread.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Lost and Found: Detecting Small Road Hazards for Self-Driving Vehicles

Detecting small obstacles on the road ahead is a critical part of the driving task which has to be mastered by fully autonomous cars. In this paper, we present a method based on stereo vision to reliably detect such obstacles from a moving vehicle. The proposed algorithm performs statistical hypothesis tests in disparity space directly on stereo image data, assessing freespace and obstacle hypotheses on independent local patches. This detection approach does not depend on a global road model and handles both static and moving obstacles. For evaluation, we employ a novel lost-cargo image sequence dataset comprising more than two thousand frames with pixelwise annotations of obstacle and free-space and provide a thorough comparison to several stereo-based baseline methods. The dataset will be made available to the community to foster further research on this important topic. The proposed approach outperforms all considered baselines in our evaluations on both pixel and object level and runs at frame rates of up to 20 Hz on 2 mega-pixel stereo imagery. Small obstacles down to the height of 5 cm can successfully be detected at 20 m distance at low false positive rates.

cs.CV↗