Monocular depth estimation is a task aimed at predicting pixel-level distances from a single RGB image. This task holds significance in various applications including autonomous driving and robotics. In particular, the recognition of surrounding environments is important to avoid collisions during autonomous parking. Fisheye cameras are adequate to acquire visual information from a wide field of view, reducing blind spots and preventing potential collisions. While there have been increasing demands for fisheye cameras in visual-recognition systems, existing research on depth estimation has primarily focused on pinhole camera images. Moreover, depth estimation from fisheye images poses additional challenges due to strong distortion and the lack of public datasets. In this work, we propose a novel underground parking lot dataset called JBNU-Depth360, which consists of fisheye camera images and their corresponding LiDAR projections. Our proposed dataset was composed of 4221 pairs of fisheye images and their corresponding LiDAR point clouds, which were obtained from six driving sequences. Furthermore, we employed a knowledge-distillation technique to improve the performance of the state-of-the-art depth-estimation models. The teacher–student learning framework allows the neural network to leverage the information in dense depth predictions and sparse LiDAR projections. Experiments were conducted on the KITTI-360 and JBNU-Depth360 datasets for analyzing the performance of existing depth-estimation models on fisheye camera images. By utilizing the self-distillation technique, the AbsRel and SILog error metrics were reduced by 1.81% and 1.55% on the JBNU-Depth360 dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that the self-distillation technique is beneficial to improve the performance of depth-estimation models.
1 January 2025 in Computers in Biology and Medicine
To achieve full autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), obstacle detection and avoidance are indispensable parts of visual recognition systems. In particular, detecting transmission lines is an important topic due to the potential risk of accidents while operating at low altitude. Even though many studies have been conducted to detect transmission lines, there still remains many challenges due to their thin shapes in diverse backgrounds. Moreover, most previous methods require a significant level of human involvement to generate pixel-level ground truth data. In this paper, we propose a transmission line detection algorithm based on weakly supervised learning and unpaired image-to-image translation. The proposed algorithm only requires image-level labels, and a novel attention module, which is called parallel dilated attention (PDA), improves the detection accuracy by recalibrating channel importance based on the information from various receptive fields. Finally, we construct a refinement network based on unpaired image-to-image translation in order that the prediction map is guided to detect line-shaped objects. The proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 2.74% in terms of F1-score, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for detecting transmission lines in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.
28 February 2011 in Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have become an effective method for encoding scenes into neural representations, allowing for the synthesis of photorealistic views of unseen views from given input images. However, the applicability of traditional NeRF is significantly limited by its assumption that images are captured for object-centric scenes with a pinhole camera. Expanding these boundaries, we focus on driving scenarios using a fisheye camera, which offers the advantage of capturing visual information from a wide field of view. To address the challenges due to the unbounded and distorted characteristics of fisheye images, we propose an edge-aware integration loss function. This approach leverages sparse LiDAR projections and dense depth maps estimated from a learning-based depth model. The proposed algorithm assigns larger weights to neighboring points that have depth values similar to the sensor data. Experiments were conducted on the KITTI-360 and JBNU-Depth360 datasets, which are public and real-world datasets of driving scenarios using fisheye cameras. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is effective in synthesizing novel view images, outperforming existing approaches.
In this paper, we propose a method that learns a general representation of periodic signals from unlabeled facial videos by capturing subtle changes in skin tone over time. The proposed framework employs the video masked autoencoder to learn a high-dimensional spatio-temporal representation of the facial region through self-supervised learning. Capturing quasi-periodic signals in the video is crucial for remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) estimation. To account for signal periodicity, we apply frame masking in terms of video sampling, which allows the model to capture resampled quasi-periodic signals during the pre-training stage. Moreover, the framework incorporates physiological bandlimit constraints, leveraging the property that physiological signals are sparse within their frequency bandwidth to provide pulse cues to the model. The pre-trained encoder is then transferred to the rPPG task, where it is used to extract physiological signals from facial videos. We evaluate the proposed method through extensive experiments on the PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V datasets. Our results demonstrate significant performance improvements, particularly in challenging cross-dataset evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.