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Yuxuan Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Yuxuan Xia.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

3D Extended Object Tracking by Fusing Roadside Sparse Radar Point Clouds and Pixel Keypoints

Roadside perception is a key component in intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we present a novel three-dimensional (3D) extended object tracking (EOT) method, which simultaneously estimates the object kinematics and extent state, in roadside perception using both the radar and camera data. Because of the influence of sensor viewing angle and limited angle resolution, radar measurements from objects are sparse and non-uniformly distributed, leading to inaccuracies in object extent and position estimation. To address this problem, we present a novel spherical Gaussian function weighted Gaussian mixture model. This model assumes that radar measurements originate from a series of probabilistic weighted radar reflectors on the vehicle's extent. Additionally, we utilize visual detection of vehicle keypoints to provide additional information on the positions of radar reflectors. Since keypoints may not always correspond to radar reflectors, we propose an elastic skeleton fusion mechanism, which constructs a virtual force to establish the relationship between the radar reflectors on the vehicle and its extent. Furthermore, to better describe the kinematic state of the vehicle and constrain its extent state, we develop a new 3D constant turn rate and velocity motion model, considering the complex 3D motion of the vehicle relative to the roadside sensor. Finally, we apply variational Bayesian approximation to the intractable measurement update step to enable recursive Bayesian estimation of the object's state. Simulation results using the Carla simulator and experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in comparison to several state-of-the-art 3D EOT methods.

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Set-Type Belief Propagation with Applications to Poisson Multi-Bernoulli SLAM

Belief propagation (BP) is a useful probabilistic inference algorithm for efficiently computing approximate marginal probability densities of random variables. However, in its standard form, BP is only applicable to the vector-type random variables with a fixed and known number of vector elements, while certain applications rely on RFSs with an unknown number of vector elements. In this paper, we develop BP rules for factor graphs defined on sequences of RFSs where each RFS has an unknown number of elements, with the intention of deriving novel inference methods for RFSs. Furthermore, we show that vector-type BP is a special case of set-type BP, where each RFS follows the Bernoulli process. To demonstrate the validity of developed set-type BP, we apply it to the PMB filter for SLAM, which naturally leads to new set-type BP-mapping, SLAM, multi-target tracking, and simultaneous localization and tracking filters. Finally, we explore the relationships between the vector-type BP and the proposed set-type BP PMB-SLAM implementations and show a performance gain of the proposed set-type BP PMB-SLAM filter in comparison with the vector-type BP-SLAM filter.

cs.AI↗

Boosting Few-Shot Segmentation via Instance-Aware Data Augmentation and Local Consensus Guided Cross Attention

Few-shot segmentation aims to train a segmentation model that can fast adapt to a novel task for which only a few annotated images are provided. Most recent models have adopted a prototype-based paradigm for few-shot inference. These approaches may have limited generalization capacity beyond the standard 1- or 5-shot settings. In this paper, we closely examine and reevaluate the fine-tuning based learning scheme that fine-tunes the classification layer of a deep segmentation network pre-trained on diverse base classes. To improve the generalizability of the classification layer optimized with sparsely annotated samples, we introduce an instance-aware data augmentation (IDA) strategy that augments the support images based on the relative sizes of the target objects. The proposed IDA effectively increases the support set's diversity and promotes the distribution consistency between support and query images. On the other hand, the large visual difference between query and support images may hinder knowledge transfer and cripple the segmentation performance. To cope with this challenge, we introduce the local consensus guided cross attention (LCCA) to align the query feature with support features based on their dense correlation, further improving the model's generalizability to the query image. The significant performance improvements on the standard few-shot segmentation benchmarks PASCAL-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ verify the efficacy of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

Transformer-Based Multi-Object Smoothing with Decoupled Data Association and Smoothing

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the task of estimating the state trajectories of an unknown and time-varying number of objects over a certain time window. Several algorithms have been proposed to tackle the multi-object smoothing task, where object detections can be conditioned on all the measurements in the time window. However, the best-performing methods suffer from intractable computational complexity and require approximations, performing suboptimally in complex settings. Deep learning based algorithms are a possible venue for tackling this issue but have not been applied extensively in settings where accurate multi-object models are available and measurements are low-dimensional. We propose a novel DL architecture specifically tailored for this setting that decouples the data association task from the smoothing task. We compare the performance of the proposed smoother to the state-of-the-art in different tasks of varying difficulty and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison between traditional Bayesian trackers and DL trackers in the smoothing problem setting.

cs.CV↗

LXL: LiDAR Excluded Lean 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar and Camera Fusion

As an emerging technology and a relatively affordable device, the 4D imaging radar has already been confirmed effective in performing 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Nevertheless, the sparsity and noisiness of 4D radar point clouds hinder further performance improvement, and in-depth studies about its fusion with other modalities are lacking. On the other hand, as a new image view transformation strategy, "sampling" has been applied in a few image-based detectors and shown to outperform the widely applied "depth-based splatting" proposed in Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS), even without image depth prediction. However, the potential of "sampling" is not fully unleashed. This paper investigates the "sampling" view transformation strategy on the camera and 4D imaging radar fusion-based 3D object detection. LiDAR Excluded Lean (LXL) model, predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids are generated from image perspective view (PV) features and radar bird's eye view (BEV) features, respectively. They are sent to the core of LXL, called "radar occupancy-assisted depth-based sampling", to aid image view transformation. We demonstrated that more accurate view transformation can be performed by introducing image depths and radar information to enhance the "sampling" strategy. Experiments on VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art 3D object detection methods by a significant margin without bells and whistles. Ablation studies demonstrate that our method performs the best among different enhancement settings.

cs.CV↗

Trajectory PMB Filters for Extended Object Tracking Using Belief Propagation

In this paper, we propose a Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) filter for extended object tracking (EOT), which directly estimates the set of object trajectories, using belief propagation (BP). The proposed filter propagates a PMB density on the posterior of sets of trajectories through the filtering recursions over time, where the PMB mixture (PMBM) posterior after the update step is approximated as a PMB. The efficient PMB approximation relies on several important theoretical contributions. First, we present a PMBM conjugate prior on the posterior of sets of trajectories for a generalized measurement model, in which each object generates an independent set of measurements. The PMBM density is a conjugate prior in the sense that both the prediction and the update steps preserve the PMBM form of the density. Second, we present a factor graph representation of the joint posterior of the PMBM set of trajectories and association variables for the Poisson spatial measurement model. Importantly, leveraging the PMBM conjugacy and the factor graph formulation enables an elegant treatment on undetected objects via a Poisson point process and efficient inference on sets of trajectories using BP, where the approximate marginal densities in the PMB approximation can be obtained without enumeration of different data association hypotheses. To achieve this, we present a particle-based implementation of the proposed filter, where smoothed trajectory estimates, if desired, can be obtained via single-object particle smoothing methods, and its performance for EOT with ellipsoidal shapes is evaluated in a simulation study.

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Scene Separation & Data Selection: Temporal Segmentation Algorithm for Real-Time Video Stream Analysis

We present 2SDS (Scene Separation and Data Selection algorithm), a temporal segmentation algorithm used in real-time video stream interpretation. It complements CNN-based models to make use of temporal information in videos. 2SDS can detect the change between scenes in a video stream by com-paring the image difference between two frames. It separates a video into segments (scenes), and by combining itself with a CNN model, 2SDS can select the optimal result for each scene. In this paper, we will be discussing some basic methods and concepts behind 2SDS, as well as presenting some preliminary experiment results regarding 2SDS. During these experiments, 2SDS has achieved an overall accuracy of over 90%.

cs.CV↗

Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture filter with general target-generated measurements and arbitrary clutter

This paper shows that the Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) density is a multi-target conjugate prior for general target-generated measurement distributions and arbitrary clutter distributions. That is, for this multi-target measurement model and the standard multi-target dynamic model with Poisson birth model, the predicted and filtering densities are PMBMs. We derive the corresponding PMBM filtering recursion. Based on this result, we implement a PMBM filter for point-target measurement models and negative binomial clutter density in which data association hypotheses with high weights are chosen via Gibbs sampling. We also implement an extended target PMBM filter with clutter that is the union of Poisson-distributed clutter and a finite number of independent clutter sources. Simulation results show the benefits of the proposed filters to deal with non-standard clutter.

stat.AP↗

Deep Fusion of Multi-Object Densities Using Transformer

In this paper, we demonstrate that deep learning based method can be used to fuse multi-object densities. Given a scenario with several sensors with possibly different field-of-views, tracking is performed locally in each sensor by a tracker, which produces random finite set multi-object densities. To fuse outputs from different trackers, we adapt a recently proposed transformer-based multi-object tracker, where the fusion result is a global multi-object density, describing the set of all alive objects at the current time. We compare the performance of the transformer-based fusion method with a well-performing model-based Bayesian fusion method in several simulated scenarios with different parameter settings using synthetic data. The simulation results show that the transformer-based fusion method outperforms the model-based Bayesian method in our experimental scenarios.

cs.LG↗

GNN-PMB: A Simple but Effective Online 3D Multi-Object Tracker without Bells and Whistles

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is among crucial applications in modern advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) systems. The global nearest neighbor (GNN) filter, as the earliest random vector-based Bayesian tracking framework, has been adopted in most of state-of-the-arts trackers in the automotive industry. The development of random finite set (RFS) theory facilitates a mathematically rigorous treatment of the MOT problem, and different variants of RFS-based Bayesian filters have then been proposed. However, their effectiveness in the real ADAS and AD application is still an open problem. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the latest RFS-based Bayesian tracking framework could be superior to typical random vector-based Bayesian tracking framework via a systematic comparative study of both traditional random vector-based Bayesian filters with rule-based heuristic track maintenance and RFS-based Bayesian filters on the nuScenes validation dataset. An RFS-based tracker, namely Poisson multi-Bernoulli filter using the global nearest neighbor (GNN-PMB), is proposed to LiDAR-based MOT tasks. This GNN-PMB tracker is simple to use, and it achieves competitive results on the nuScenes dataset. Specifically, the proposed GNN-PMB tracker outperforms most state-of-the-art LiDAR-only trackers and LiDAR and camera fusion-based trackers, ranking the $3^{rd}$ among all LiDAR-only trackers on nuScenes 3D tracking challenge leader board at the time of submission.

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Contrastive Learning for Automotive mmWave Radar Detection Points Based Instance Segmentation

The automotive mmWave radar plays a key role in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. Deep learning-based instance segmentation enables real-time object identification from the radar detection points. In the conventional training process, accurate annotation is the key. However, high-quality annotations of radar detection points are challenging to achieve due to their ambiguity and sparsity. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive learning approach for implementing radar detection points-based instance segmentation. We define the positive and negative samples according to the ground-truth label, apply the contrastive loss to train the model first, and then perform fine-tuning for the following downstream task. In addition, these two steps can be merged into one, and pseudo labels can be generated for the unlabeled data to improve the performance further. Thus, there are four different training settings for our method. Experiments show that when the ground-truth information is only available for a small proportion of the training data, our method still achieves a comparable performance to the approach trained in a supervised manner with 100% ground-truth information.

cs.CV↗

Deep Instance Segmentation with Automotive Radar Detection Points

Automotive radar provides reliable environmental perception in all-weather conditions with affordable cost, but it hardly supplies semantic and geometry information due to the sparsity of radar detection points. With the development of automotive radar technologies in recent years, instance segmentation becomes possible by using automotive radar. Its data contain contexts such as radar cross section and micro-Doppler effects, and sometimes can provide detection when the field of view is obscured. The outcome from instance segmentation could be potentially used as the input of trackers for tracking targets. The existing methods often utilize a clustering-based classification framework, which fits the need of real-time processing but has limited performance due to minimum information provided by sparse radar detection points. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on clustering of estimated semantic information to achieve instance segmentation for the sparse radar detection points. In addition, we show that the performance of the proposed approach can be further enhanced by incorporating the visual multi-layer perceptron. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results on the popular RadarScenes dataset, achieving 89.53% mean coverage and 86.97% mean average precision with the IoU threshold of 0.5, which is superior to other approaches in the literature. More significantly, the consumed memory is around 1MB, and the inference time is less than 40ms, indicating that our proposed algorithm is storage and time efficient. These two criteria ensure the practicality of the proposed method in real-world systems.

cs.CV↗

A comparison between PMBM Bayesian track initiation and labelled RFS adaptive birth

This paper provides a comparative analysis between the adaptive birth model used in the labelled random finite set literature and the track initiation in the Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) filter, with point-target models. The PMBM track initiation is obtained via Bayes' rule applied on the predicted PMBM density, and creates one Bernoulli component for each received measurement, representing that this measurement may be clutter or a detection from a new target. Adaptive birth mimics this procedure by creating a Bernoulli component for each measurement using a different rule to determine the probability of existence and a user-defined single-target density. This paper first provides an analysis of the differences that arise in track initiation based on isolated measurements. Then, it shows that adaptive birth underestimates the number of objects present in the surveillance area under common modelling assumptions. Finally, we provide numerical simulations to further illustrate the differences.

stat.AP↗

Multiple Object Trajectory Estimation Using Backward Simulation

This paper presents a general solution for computing the multi-object posterior for sets of trajectories from a sequence of multi-object (unlabelled) filtering densities and a multi-object dynamic model. Importantly, the proposed solution opens an avenue of trajectory estimation possibilities for multi-object filters that do not explicitly estimate trajectories. In this paper, we first derive a general multi-trajectory backward smoothing equation based on random finite sets of trajectories. Then we show how to sample sets of trajectories using backward simulation for Poisson multi-Bernoulli filtering densities, and develop a tractable implementation based on ranked assignment. The performance of the resulting multi-trajectory particle smoothers is evaluated in a simulation study, and the results demonstrate that they have superior performance in comparison to several state-of-the-art multi-object filters and smoothers.

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Can Deep Learning be Applied to Model-Based Multi-Object Tracking?

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the problem of tracking the state of an unknown and time-varying number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications such as autonomous driving, tracking animal behavior, defense systems, and others. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been increasingly used in MOT for improving tracking performance, but mostly in settings where the measurements are high-dimensional and there are no available models of the measurement likelihood and the object dynamics. The model-based setting instead has not attracted as much attention, and it is still unclear if DL methods can outperform traditional model-based Bayesian methods, which are the state of the art (SOTA) in this context. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based DL tracker and evaluate its performance in the model-based setting, comparing it to SOTA model-based Bayesian methods in a variety of different tasks. Our results show that the proposed DL method can match the performance of the model-based methods in simple tasks, while outperforming them when the task gets more complicated, either due to an increase in the data association complexity, or to stronger nonlinearities of the models of the environment.

cs.LG↗

An Uncertainty-Aware Performance Measure for Multi-Object Tracking

Evaluating the performance of multi-object tracking (MOT) methods is not straightforward, and existing performance measures fail to consider all the available uncertainty information in the MOT context. This can lead practitioners to select models which produce uncertainty estimates of lower quality, negatively impacting any downstream systems that rely on them. Additionally, most MOT performance measures have hyperparameters, which makes comparisons of different trackers less straightforward. We propose the use of the negative log-likelihood (NLL) of the multi-object posterior given the set of ground-truth objects as a performance measure. This measure takes into account all available uncertainty information in a sound mathematical manner without hyperparameters. We provide efficient algorithms for approximating the computation of the NLL for several common MOT algorithms, show that in some cases it decomposes and approximates the widely-used GOSPA metric, and provide several illustrative examples highlighting the advantages of the NLL in comparison to other MOT performance measures.

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Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Approximations for Multiple Extended Object Filtering

The Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) is a multi-object conjugate prior for the closed-form Bayes random finite sets filter. The extended object PMBM filter provides a closed-form solution for multiple extended object filtering with standard models. This paper considers computationally lighter alternatives to the extended object PMBM filter by propagating a Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) density through the filtering recursion. A new local hypothesis representation is presented where each measurement creates a new Bernoulli component. This facilitates the developments of methods for efficiently approximating the PMBM posterior density after the update step as a PMB. Based on the new hypothesis representation, two approximation methods are presented: one is based on the track-oriented multi-Bernoulli (MB) approximation, and the other is based on the variational MB approximation via Kullback-Leibler divergence minimisation. The performance of the proposed PMB filters with gamma Gaussian inverse-Wishart implementations are evaluated in a simulation study.

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Next Generation Multitarget Trackers: Random Finite Set Methods vs Transformer-based Deep Learning

Multitarget Tracking (MTT) is the problem of tracking the states of an unknown number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications to autonomous driving, surveillance, robotics, and others. In the model-based Bayesian setting, there are conjugate priors that enable us to express the multi-object posterior in closed form, which could theoretically provide Bayes-optimal estimates. However, the posterior involves a super-exponential growth of the number of hypotheses over time, forcing state-of-the-art methods to resort to approximations for remaining tractable, which can impact their performance in complex scenarios. Model-free methods based on deep-learning provide an attractive alternative, as they can, in principle, learn the optimal filter from data, but to the best of our knowledge were never compared to current state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, specially not in contexts where accurate models are available. In this paper, we propose a high-performing deep-learning method for MTT based on the Transformer architecture and compare it to two state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, in a setting where we assume the correct model is provided. Although this gives an edge to the model-based filters, it also allows us to generate unlimited training data. We show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian filters in complex scenarios, while matching their performance in simpler cases, which validates the applicability of deep-learning also in the model-based regime. The code for all our implementations is made available at https://github.com/JulianoLagana/MT3 .

cs.LG↗