One of the major open challenges in self-driving cars is the ability to detect cars and pedestrians to safely navigate in the world. Deep learning-based object detector approaches have enabled great advances in using camera imagery to detect and classify objects. But for a safety critical application, such as autonomous driving, the error rates of the current state of the art are still too high to enable safe operation. Moreover, the characterization of object detector performance is primarily limited to testing on prerecorded datasets. Errors that occur on novel data go undetected without additional human labels. In this letter, we propose an automated method to identify mistakes made by object detectors without ground truth labels . We show that inconsistencies in the object detector output between a pair of similar images can be used as hypotheses for false negatives (e.g., missed detections) and using a novel set of features for each hypothesis, an off-the-shelf binary classifier can be used to find valid errors. In particular, we study two distinct cues– temporal and stereo inconsistencies—using data that are readily available on most autonomous vehicles. Our method can be used with any camera-based object detector and we illustrate the technique on several sets of real world data. We show that a state-of-the-art detector, tracker, and our classifier trained only on synthetic data can identify valid errors on KITTI tracking dataset with an average precision of 0.94. We also release a new tracking dataset with 104 sequences totaling 80,655 labeled pairs of stereo images along with ground truth disparity from a game engine to facilitate further research.
Sensor fusion poses a related problem by using multiple modalities to understand the world and in some cases identify errors or provide self-supervised labeling @cite_1 . However, in this work we focus on identifying errors within camera imagery alone. This enables single frame object detectors to be independently validated and improved without the confounds of other modalities.
@cite_1
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A perception system for pedestrian detection in urban scenarios using information from a LIDAR and a single camera is presented. Two sensor fusion architectures are described, a centralized and a decentralized one. In the former, the fusion process occurs at the feature level, i.e., features from LIDAR and vision spaces are combined in a single vector for posterior classification using a single classifier. In the latter, two classifiers are employed, one per sensor-feature space, which were offline selected based on information theory and fused by a trainable fusion method applied over the likelihoods provided by the component classifiers. The proposed schemes for sensor combination, and more specifically the trainable fusion method, lead to enhanced detection performance and, in addition, maintenance of false-alarms under tolerable values in comparison with single-based classifiers. Experimental results highlight the performance and effectiveness of the proposed pedestrian detection system and the related sensor data combination strategies. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Remote sensing satellite sensors feature a tradeoff between the spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for the spatio–temporal–spectral fusion of remote sensing images. There are two main advantages of the proposed integrated fusion framework: it can accomplish different kinds of fusion tasks, such as multiview spatial fusion, spatio–spectral fusion, and spatio–temporal fusion, based on a single unified model, and it can achieve the integrated fusion of multisource observations to obtain high spatio–temporal–spectral resolution images, without limitations on the number of remote sensing sensors. The proposed integrated fusion framework was comprehensively tested and verified in a variety of image fusion experiments. In the experiments, a number of different remote sensing satellites were utilized, including IKONOS, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), the Hyperspectral Digital Imagery Collection Experiment (HYDICE), and Systeme Pour l' Observation de la Terre-5 (SPOT-5). The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. This paper presents a compact and accurate representation of 3D scenes that are observed by a LiDAR sensor and a monocular camera. The proposed method is based on the well-established Stixel model originally developed for stereo vision applications. We extend this Stixel concept to incorporate data from multiple sensor modalities. The resulting mid-level fusion scheme takes full advantage of the geometric accuracy of LiDAR measurements as well as the high resolution and semantic detail of RGB images. The obtained environment model provides a geometrically and semantically consistent representation of the 3D scene at a significantly reduced amount of data while minimizing information loss at the same time. Since the different sensor modalities are considered as input to a joint optimization problem, the solution is obtained with only minor computational overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal Stixel algorithm on a manually annotated ground truth dataset. Our results indicate that the proposed mid-level fusion of LiDAR and camera data improves both the geometric and semantic accuracy of the Stixel model significantly while reducing the computational overhead as well as the amount of generated data in comparison to using a single modality on its own. In this paper, we address the problem of optimizing the detection performance of sensor networks under communication constraints on the common access channel. Our work helps understanding tradeoffs between sensor network para-meters like number of sensors, degree of quantization at each local sensor, and SNR. Traditionally, this problem is tack-led using asymptotic assumptions on the number of sensors, an approach that leads to the abstraction of important details such as the structure of the fusion center. We adopt a non-asymptotic approach and optimize both, the sensing and the fusion sides with respect to the probability of detection error. We show that the optimal fusion rule has an interesting structure similar to themajority-voting rule. In addition, we study the convergence with respect to the number of sensors of the performance of the fusion rule. We show that convergence is SNR dependent and that, in low-SNR environments, asymptotics may require a large number of sensors.