This work explores the feasibility of steering a drone with a (recurrent) neural network, based on input from a forward looking camera, in the context of a high-level navigation task. We set up a generic framework for training a network to perform navigation tasks based on imitation learning. It can be applied to both aerial and land vehicles. As a proof of concept we apply it to a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in a simulated environment, learning to cross a room containing a number of obstacles. So far only feedforward neural networks (FNNs) have been used to train UAV control. To cope with more complex tasks, we propose the use of recurrent neural networks (RNN) instead and successfully train an LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) network for controlling UAVs. Vision based control is a sequential prediction problem, known for its highly correlated input data. The correlation makes training a network hard, especially an RNN. To overcome this issue, we investigate an alternative sampling method during training, namely window-wise truncated backpropagation through time (WW-TBPTT). Further, end-to-end training requires a lot of data which often is not available. Therefore, we compare the performance of retraining only the Fully Connected (FC) and LSTM control layers with networks which are trained end-to-end. Performing the relatively simple task of crossing a room already reveals important guidelines and good practices for training neural control networks. Different visualizations help to explain the behavior learned.
Neural networks need a lot of annotated data. @cite_6 have made a virtual environment from which a very big annotated dataset was obtained. They train a control network to drive a car autonomously on a dataset containing less than 8 percent of real data. In the same spirit, we see it fit to explore the training behavior of different control networks first in a simulated environment. Once the control behaves properly the step to the real world only needs a relatively small amount of extra training data from the real world.
@cite_6
2790277825 2770173563 2769315836 2886245013
Deep neural networks typically require large amounts of annotated data to be trained effectively. However, in several scientific disciplines, including medical image analysis, generating such large annotated datasets requires specialized domain knowledge, and hence is usually very expensive. In this work, we present a novel application of active learning to data sample selection for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for Cancerous Tissue Recognition (CTR). Our main idea is to steer annotation efforts towards selecting the most informative samples for training the CNN. To quantify informativeness, we explore three choices based on discrete entropy, best-vs-second-best, and k-nearest neighbor agreement. Our results on three different types of cancer datasets consistently demonstrate that under limited annotated samples, our proposed training scheme converges faster than classical randomized stochastic gradient descent, while achieving the same (or sometimes superior) classification accuracy. Effective training of neural networks requires much data. In the low-data regime, parameters are underdetermined, and learnt networks generalise poorly. Data Augmentation krizhevsky2012imagenet alleviates this by using existing data more effectively. However standard data augmentation produces only limited plausible alternative data. Given there is potential to generate a much broader set of augmentations, we design and train a generative model to do data augmentation. The model, based on image conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, takes data from a source domain and learns to take any data item and generalise it to generate other within-class data items. As this generative process does not depend on the classes themselves, it can be applied to novel unseen classes of data. We show that a Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Network (DAGAN) augments standard vanilla classifiers well. We also show a DAGAN can enhance few-shot learning systems such as Matching Networks. We demonstrate these approaches on Omniglot, on EMNIST having learnt the DAGAN on Omniglot, and VGG-Face data. In our experiments we can see over 13 increase in accuracy in the low-data regime experiments in Omniglot (from 69 to 82 ), EMNIST (73.9 to 76 ) and VGG-Face (4.5 to 12 ); in Matching Networks for Omniglot we observe an increase of 0.5 (from 96.9 to 97.4 ) and an increase of 1.8 in EMNIST (from 59.5 to 61.3 ). Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to perform extremely well at a variety of tasks including subtasks of autonomous driving such as image segmentation and object classification. However, networks designed for these tasks typically require vast quantities of training data and long training periods to converge. We investigate the design rationale behind end-to-end driving network designs by proposing and comparing three small and computationally inexpensive deep end-to-end neural network models that generate driving control signals directly from input images. In contrast to prior work that segments the autonomous driving task, our models take on a novel approach to the autonomous driving problem by utilizing deep and thin Fully Convolutional Nets (FCNs) with recurrent neural nets and low parameter counts to tackle a complex end-to-end regression task predicting both steering and acceleration commands. In addition, we include layers optimized for classification to allow the networks to implicitly learn image semantics. We show that the resulting networks use 3x fewer parameters than the most recent comparable end-to-end driving network and 500x fewer parameters than the AlexNet variations and converge both faster and to lower losses while maintaining robustness against overfitting. Recent work has shown that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to estimate optical flow with high quality and fast runtime. This makes them preferable for real-world applications. However, such networks require very large training datasets. Engineering the training data is difficult and or laborious. This paper shows how to augment a network trained on an existing synthetic dataset with large amounts of additional unlabelled data. In particular, we introduce a selection mechanism to assemble from multiple estimates a joint optical flow field, which outperforms that of all input methods. The latter can be used as proxy-ground-truth to train a network on real-world data and to adapt it to specific domains of interest. Our experimental results show that the performance of networks improves considerably, both, in cross-domain and in domain-specific scenarios. As a consequence, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmarks.