The detection of unknown traffic obstacles is vital to ensure safe autonomous driving. The standard object-detection methods cannot identify unknown objects that are not included under predefined categories. This is because object-detection methods are trained to assign a background label to pixels corresponding to the presence of unknown objects. To address this problem, the pixel-wise anomaly-detection approach has attracted increased research attention. Anomaly-detection techniques, such as uncertainty estimation and perceptual difference from reconstructed images, make it possible to identify pixels of unknown objects as out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, when applied to images with many unknowns and complex components, such as driving scenes, these methods often exhibit unstable performance. The purpose of this study is to achieve stable performance for detecting unknown objects by incorporating the object-detection fashions into the pixel-wise anomaly detection methods. To achieve this goal, we adopt a semantic-segmentation network with a sigmoid head that simultaneously provides pixel-wise anomaly scores and objectness scores. Our experimental results show that the objectness scores play an important role in improving the detection performance. Based on these results, we propose a novel anomaly score by integrating these two scores, which we term as unknown objectness score. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods when applied to the publicly available datasets.

Scene Text Image Super-resolution (STISR) has recently achieved great success as a preprocessing method for scene text recognition. STISR aims to transform blurred and noisy low-resolution (LR) text images in real-world settings into clear high-resolution (HR) text images suitable for scene text recognition. In this study, we leverage text-conditional diffusion models (DMs), known for their impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities, for STISR tasks. Our experimental results revealed that text-conditional DMs notably surpass existing STISR methods. Especially when texts from LR text images are given as input, the text-conditional DMs are able to produce superior quality super-resolution text images. Utilizing this capability, we propose a novel framework for synthesizing LR-HR paired text image datasets. This framework consists of three specialized text-conditional DMs, each dedicated to text image synthesis, super-resolution, and image degradation. These three modules are vital for synthesizing distinct LR and HR paired images, which are more suitable for training STISR methods. Our experiments confirmed that these synthesized image pairs significantly enhance the performance of STISR methods in the TextZoom evaluation.

In recent years, many automobiles have been equipped with cameras, which have accumulated an enormous amount of video footage of driving scenes. Autonomous driving demands the highest level of safety, for which even unimaginably rare driving scenes have to be collected in training data to improve the recognition accuracy for specific scenes. However, it is prohibitively costly to find very few specific scenes from an enormous amount of videos. In this article, we show that proper video-to-video distances can be defined by focusing on ego-vehicle actions. It is well known that existing methods based on supervised learning cannot handle videos that do not fall into predefined classes, though they work well in defining video-to-video distances in the embedding space between labeled videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a method based on semi-supervised contrastive learning. We consider two related but distinct contrastive learning: standard graph contrastive learning and our proposed SOIA-based contrastive learning. We observe that the latter approach can provide more sensible video-to-video distances between unlabeled videos. Next, the effectiveness of our method is quantified by evaluating the classification performance of the ego-vehicle action recognition using HDD dataset, which shows that our method including unlabeled data in training significantly outperforms the existing methods using only labeled data in training.