Publications | Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

2014

avg ps Schoenbein, M., Geiger, A. Omnidirectional 3D Reconstruction in Augmented Manhattan Worlds International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages: 716 - 723, IEEE, Chicago, IL, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System, October 2014 (conference)

Probabilistic Progress Bars

Kiefel, M., Schuler, C., Hennig, P.

In Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 8753, pages: 331-341, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Jiang, X., Hornegger, J., and Koch, R.), Springer, GCPR, September 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Predicting the time at which the integral over a stochastic process reaches a target level is a value of interest in many applications. Often, such computations have to be made at low cost, in real time. As an intuitive example that captures many features of this problem class, we choose progress bars, a ubiquitous element of computer user interfaces. These predictors are usually based on simple point estimators, with no error modelling. This leads to fluctuating behaviour confusing to the user. It also does not provide a distribution prediction (risk values), which are crucial for many other application areas. We construct and empirically evaluate a fast, constant cost algorithm using a Gauss-Markov process model which provides more information to the user.

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website+code pdf DOI [BibTex]

ei ps pn Kiefel, M., Schuler, C., Hennig, P. Probabilistic Progress Bars In Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 8753, pages: 331-341, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Jiang, X., Hornegger, J., and Koch, R.), Springer, GCPR, September 2014 (inproceedings)

website+code pdf DOI [BibTex]

Optimizing Average Precision using Weakly Supervised Data

Behl, A., Jawahar, C. V., Kumar, M. P.

IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2014, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2014 (conference)

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avg Behl, A., Jawahar, C. V., Kumar, M. P. Optimizing Average Precision using Weakly Supervised Data IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2014, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2014 (conference)

Simultaneous Underwater Visibility Assessment, Enhancement and Improved Stereo

Roser, M., Dunbabin, M., Geiger, A.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 3840 - 3847 , Hong Kong, China, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, June 2014 (conference)

Abstract

Vision-based underwater navigation and obstacle avoidance demands robust computer vision algorithms, particularly for operation in turbid water with reduced visibility. This paper describes a novel method for the simultaneous underwater image quality assessment, visibility enhancement and disparity computation to increase stereo range resolution under dynamic, natural lighting and turbid conditions. The technique estimates the visibility properties from a sparse 3D map of the original degraded image using a physical underwater light attenuation model. Firstly, an iterated distance-adaptive image contrast enhancement enables a dense disparity computation and visibility estimation. Secondly, using a light attenuation model for ocean water, a color corrected stereo underwater image is obtained along with a visibility distance estimate. Experimental results in shallow, naturally lit, high-turbidity coastal environments show the proposed technique improves range estimation over the original images as well as image quality and color for habitat classification. Furthermore, the recursiveness and robustness of the technique allows real-time implementation onboard an Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for improved navigation and obstacle avoidance performance.

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avg ps Roser, M., Dunbabin, M., Geiger, A. Simultaneous Underwater Visibility Assessment, Enhancement and Improved Stereo IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 3840 - 3847 , Hong Kong, China, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, June 2014 (conference)

Calibrating and Centering Quasi-Central Catadioptric Cameras

Schoenbein, M., Strauss, T., Geiger, A.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 4443 - 4450, Hong Kong, China, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, June 2014 (conference)

Abstract

Non-central catadioptric models are able to cope with irregular camera setups and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process but are computationally demanding and thus not suitable for robotic applications. On the other hand, calibrating a quasi-central (almost central) system with a central model introduces errors due to a wrong relationship between the viewing ray orientations and the pixels on the image sensor. In this paper, we propose a central approximation to quasi-central catadioptric camera systems that is both accurate and efficient. We observe that the distance to points in 3D is typically large compared to deviations from the single viewpoint. Thus, we first calibrate the system using a state-of-the-art non-central camera model. Next, we show that by remapping the observations we are able to match the orientation of the viewing rays of a much simpler single viewpoint model with the true ray orientations. While our approximation is general and applicable to all quasi-central camera systems, we focus on one of the most common cases in practice: hypercatadioptric cameras. We compare our model to a variety of baselines in synthetic and real localization and motion estimation experiments. We show that by using the proposed model we are able to achieve near non-central accuracy while obtaining speed-ups of more than three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art non-central models.

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avg ps Schoenbein, M., Strauss, T., Geiger, A. Calibrating and Centering Quasi-Central Catadioptric Cameras IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages: 4443 - 4450, Hong Kong, China, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, June 2014 (conference)

pdf Youtube Supplements Project page link (url) [BibTex]

3D Traffic Scene Understanding from Movable Platforms

Geiger, A., Lauer, M., Wojek, C., Stiller, C., Urtasun, R.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(5):1012-1025, published, IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, May 2014 (article)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic generative model for multi-object traffic scene understanding from movable platforms which reasons jointly about the 3D scene layout as well as the location and orientation of objects in the scene. In particular, the scene topology, geometry and traffic activities are inferred from short video sequences. Inspired by the impressive driving capabilities of humans, our model does not rely on GPS, lidar or map knowledge. Instead, it takes advantage of a diverse set of visual cues in the form of vehicle tracklets, vanishing points, semantic scene labels, scene flow and occupancy grids. For each of these cues we propose likelihood functions that are integrated into a probabilistic generative model. We learn all model parameters from training data using contrastive divergence. Experiments conducted on videos of 113 representative intersections show that our approach successfully infers the correct layout in a variety of very challenging scenarios. To evaluate the importance of each feature cue, experiments using different feature combinations are conducted. Furthermore, we show how by employing context derived from the proposed method we are able to improve over the state-of-the-art in terms of object detection and object orientation estimation in challenging and cluttered urban environments.

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pdf link (url) [BibTex]

avg ps Geiger, A., Lauer, M., Wojek, C., Stiller, C., Urtasun, R. 3D Traffic Scene Understanding from Movable Platforms IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(5):1012-1025, published, IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, May 2014 (article)

pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Probabilistic Solutions to Differential Equations and their Application to Riemannian Statistics

Hennig, P., Hauberg, S.

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 33, pages: 347-355, JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings, (Editors: S Kaski and J Corander), Microtome Publishing, Brookline, MA, AISTATS, April 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We study a probabilistic numerical method for the solution of both boundary and initial value problems that returns a joint Gaussian process posterior over the solution. Such methods have concrete value in the statistics on Riemannian manifolds, where non-analytic ordinary differential equations are involved in virtually all computations. The probabilistic formulation permits marginalising the uncertainty of the numerical solution such that statistics are less sensitive to inaccuracies. This leads to new Riemannian algorithms for mean value computations and principal geodesic analysis. Marginalisation also means results can be less precise than point estimates, enabling a noticeable speed-up over the state of the art. Our approach is an argument for a wider point that uncertainty caused by numerical calculations should be tracked throughout the pipeline of machine learning algorithms.

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ei ps pn Hennig, P., Hauberg, S. Probabilistic Solutions to Differential Equations and their Application to Riemannian Statistics In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 33, pages: 347-355, JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings, (Editors: S Kaski and J Corander), Microtome Publishing, Brookline, MA, AISTATS, April 2014 (inproceedings)

pdf Youtube Supplements Project page link (url) [BibTex]

Probabilistic ODE Solvers with Runge-Kutta Means

Schober, M., Duvenaud, D., Hennig, P.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27, pages: 739-747, (Editors: Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N.D. Lawrence and K.Q. Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., 28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Schober, M., Duvenaud, D., Hennig, P. Probabilistic ODE Solvers with Runge-Kutta Means In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27, pages: 739-747, (Editors: Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N.D. Lawrence and K.Q. Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., 28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014 (inproceedings)

Active Learning of Linear Embeddings for Gaussian Processes

Garnett, R., Osborne, M., Hennig, P.

In Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages: 230-239, (Editors: NL Zhang and J Tian), AUAI Press , Corvallis, Oregon, UAI2014, 2014, another link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6740 (inproceedings)

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PDF Web [BibTex]

ei pn Garnett, R., Osborne, M., Hennig, P. Active Learning of Linear Embeddings for Gaussian Processes In Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages: 230-239, (Editors: NL Zhang and J Tian), AUAI Press , Corvallis, Oregon, UAI2014, 2014, another link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6740 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Probabilistic Shortest Path Tractography in DTI Using Gaussian Process ODE Solvers

Schober, M., Kasenburg, N., Feragen, A., Hennig, P., Hauberg, S.

In Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 8675, pages: 265-272, (Editors: P. Golland, N. Hata, C. Barillot, J. Hornegger and R. Howe), Springer, Heidelberg, MICCAI, 2014 (inproceedings)

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DOI [BibTex]

ei pn Schober, M., Kasenburg, N., Feragen, A., Hennig, P., Hauberg, S. Probabilistic Shortest Path Tractography in DTI Using Gaussian Process ODE Solvers In Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 8675, pages: 265-272, (Editors: P. Golland, N. Hata, C. Barillot, J. Hornegger and R. Howe), Springer, Heidelberg, MICCAI, 2014 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Sampling for Inference in Probabilistic Models with Fast Bayesian Quadrature

Gunter, T., Osborne, M., Garnett, R., Hennig, P., Roberts, S.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27, pages: 2789-2797, (Editors: Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N.D. Lawrence and K.Q. Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., 28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014 (inproceedings)

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ei pn Gunter, T., Osborne, M., Garnett, R., Hennig, P., Roberts, S. Sampling for Inference in Probabilistic Models with Fast Bayesian Quadrature In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27, pages: 2789-2797, (Editors: Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N.D. Lawrence and K.Q. Weinberger), Curran Associates, Inc., 28th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014 (inproceedings)

Learning to Rank using High-Order Information

Dokania, P. K., Behl, A., Jawahar, C. V., Kumar, M. P.

International Conference on Computer Vision, 2014 (conference)

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avg Dokania, P. K., Behl, A., Jawahar, C. V., Kumar, M. P. Learning to Rank using High-Order Information International Conference on Computer Vision, 2014 (conference)