In this paper, we investigate whether fusing depth information on top of normal RGB data for camera-based object detection can help to increase the performance of current state-of-the-art single-shot detection networks. Indeed, depth sensing is easily acquired using depth cameras such as a Kinect or stereo setups. We investigate the optimal manner to perform this sensor fusion with a special focus on lightweight single-pass convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, enabling real-time processing on limited hardware. For this, we implement a network architecture allowing us to parameterize at which network layer both information sources are fused together. We performed exhaustive experiments to determine the optimal fusion point in the network, from which we can conclude that fusing towards the mid to late layers provides the best results. Our best fusion models significantly outperform the baseline RGB network in both accuracy and localization of the detections.

Network Intrusion detection systems are essential for the protection of advanced communication networks. Originally, these systems were hard-coded to identify specific signatures, patterns and rule violations; now artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms provide promising alternatives. However, in the literature, various outdated datasets as well as a plethora of different evaluation metrics are used to prove algorithm efficacy. To enable a global comparison, this study compiles algorithms for different configurations to create common ground and proposes two new evaluation metrics. These metrics, the detection score and the identification score, together reliably present the performance of a network intrusion detection system to allow for practical comparison on a large scale. Additionally, we present a workflow to process raw packet flows into input features for machine learning. This framework quickly implements different algorithms for the various datasets and allows systematic performance comparison between those algorithms. Our experimental results, matching and surpassing the state-of-the-art, indicate the potential of this approach. As raw traffic input features are much easier and cheaper to extract when compared to traditional features, they show promise for application in real-time deep learning-based systems.

Vision sensors are attractive for autonomous robots because they are a rich source of environment information. The main challenge in using images for mobile robots is managing this wealth of information. A relatively recent approach is the use of fast wide baseline local features, which we developed and used in the novel approach to sparse visual path following described in this paper. These local features have the great advantage that they can be recognized even if the viewpoint differs significantly. This opens the door to a memory efficient description of a path by descriptors of sparse images. We propose a method for re-execution of these paths by a series of visual homing operations which yield a navigation method with unique properties: it is accurate, robust, fast, and without odometry error build-up.