Optimizing the similarity between parametric shapes is crucial for numerous computer vision tasks, where Intersection over Union (IoU) stands as the canonical measure. However, existing optimization methods exhibit significant shortcomings: regression-based losses like L1/L2 lack correlation with IoU, IoU-based losses are unstable and limited to simple shapes, and task-specific methods are computationally intensive and not generalizable across domains. As a result, the current landscape of parametric shape objective functions has become scattered, with each domain proposing distinct IoU approximations. To address this, we unify the parametric shape optimization objective functions by introducing Marginalized Generalized IoU (MGIoU), a novel loss function that overcomes these challenges by projecting structured convex shapes onto their unique shape Normals to compute one-dimensional normalized GIoU. MGIoU offers a simple, efficient, fully differentiable approximation strongly correlated with IoU. We extend MGIoU to MGIoU+ that supports optimizing unstructured convex shapes. Together, MGIoU and MGIoU+ unify parametric shape optimization across diverse applications. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MGIoU and MGIoU+ demonstrate higher performance while reducing loss computation latency up to 10-40x. Also, MGIoU and MGIoU+ satisfy metric properties and scale-invariance, ensuring robustness as an objective function. We further propose MGIoU- for minimizing overlaps in tasks like collision-free trajectory prediction.

Achieving robust and real-time 3D perception is fundamental for autonomous vehicles. While most existing 3D perception methods prioritize detection accuracy, they often overlook critical aspects such as computational efficiency, onboard chip deployment friendliness, resilience to sensor mounting deviations, and adaptability to various vehicle types. To address these challenges, we present NVAutoNet: a specialized Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) perception network tailored explicitly for automated vehicles. NVAutoNet takes synchronized camera images as input and predicts 3D signals like obstacles, freespaces, and parking spaces. The core of NVAutoNet’s architecture (image and BEV backbones) relies on efficient convolutional networks, optimized for high performance using TensorRT. Our image-to-BEV transformation employs simple linear layers and BEV lookup tables, ensuring rapid inference speed. Trained on an extensive proprietary dataset, NVAutoNet consistently achieves elevated perception accuracy, operating remarkably at 53 frames per second on the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC. Notably, NVAutoNet demonstrates resilience to sensor mounting deviations arising from diverse car models. Moreover, NVAutoNet excels in adapting to varied vehicle types, facilitated by inexpensive model fine-tuning procedures that expedite compatibility adjustments.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a novel net-working paradigm for network management and autonomous systems. However, SDN has some challenges with scalability and quality of services (QoS) in distributed multi-domain scenarios due to the unprecedented growth of heterogeneous characteristics services. There is a current gap in a standard routing mechanism for satisfying various service requirements in distributed SDN. Most existing works design a homogeneous routing strategy for heterogeneous services, which might need to be more scalable and efficient for the future of rising heterogeneous online services. This study proposes a multi service-oriented routing mechanism for multi-domain SDN, which aims to help Internet service providers (ISPs) achieve high QoS and service-level agreements (SLAs). The mechanism utilizes a service classification (through a deep learning model) and optimizes network routing (using a new cost function containing both QoS and the server load). The mechanism has been integrated into the Knowledge-defined heterogeneous network architecture and tested on four prevalent considered services: E-commerce, Interactive Data, Video On-demand, and Bulk Data Transfer. The experimental results indicate that the proposed service-oriented routing mechanism outperforms the benchmark in terms of faster server response time while reducing up to 25% of the network congestion.

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval task using deep neural networks has attracted increasing attention recently. However, training deep hashing networks for the task is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes, the similarity preserving property, and the requirement for a vast amount of labelled images. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing methods has tackled all of these challenges completely in a unified framework. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach for the task, in which the network is trained to produce binary codes directly from image pixels without the need o f manual annotation. In particular, to deal with the non-smoothness of binary constraints, we propose a novel pairwise constrained loss function, which simultaneously encodes the distances between pairs of hash codes, and the binary quantization error. In order to train the network with the proposed loss function, we propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm. In addition, to provide similar / dissimilar training images to train the network, we exploit 3D models reconstructed from unlabelled images for automatic generation of enormous training image pairs. The extensive experiments on image retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the improvements of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art compact representation methods on the image retrieval problem.

We present our approach for robotic perception in cluttered scenes that led to winning the recent Amazon Robotics Challenge (ARC) 2017. Next to small objects with shiny and transparent surfaces, the biggest challenge of the 2017 competition was the introduction of unseen categories. In contrast to traditional approaches which require large collections of annotated data and many hours of training, the task here was to obtain a robust perception pipeline with only few minutes of data acquisition and training time. To that end, we present two strategies that we explored. One is a deep metric learning approach that works in three separate steps: semantic-agnostic boundary detection, patch classification and pixel-wise voting. The other is a fully-supervised semantic segmentation approach with efficient dataset collection. We conduct an extensive analysis of the two methods on our ARC 2017 dataset. Interestingly, only few examples of each class are sufficient to fine-tune even very deep convolutional neural networks for this specific task.

The Amazon Robotics Challenge enlisted sixteen teams to each design a pick-and-place robot for autonomous warehousing, addressing development in robotic vision and manipulation. This paper presents the design of our custom-built, cost-effective, Cartesian robot system Cartman, which won first place in the competition finals by stowing 14 (out of 16) and picking all 9 items in 27 minutes, scoring a total of 272 points. We highlight our experience-centred design methodology and key aspects of our system that contributed to our competitiveness. We believe these aspects are crucial to building robust and effective robotic systems.

Robotic challenges like the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) or the DARPA Challenges are an established and important way to drive scientific progress. They make research comparable on a well-defined benchmark with equal test conditions for all participants. However, such challenge events occur only occasionally, are limited to a small number of contestants, and the test conditions are very difficult to replicate after the main event. We present a new physical benchmark challenge for robotic picking: the ACRV Picking Benchmark. Designed to be reproducible, it consists of a set of 42 common objects, a widely available shelf, and exact guidelines for object arrangement using stencils. A well-defined evaluation protocol enables the comparison of complete robotic systems - including perception and manipulation - instead of sub-systems only. Our paper also describes and reports results achieved by an open baseline system based on a Baxter robot.

Data augmentation is an essential part of the training process applied to deep learning models. The motivation is that a robust training process for deep learning models depends on large annotated datasets, which are expensive to be acquired, stored and processed. Therefore a reasonable alternative is to be able to automatically generate new annotated training samples using a process known as data augmentation. The dominant data augmentation approach in the field assumes that new training samples can be obtained via random geometric or appearance transformations applied to annotated training samples, but this is a strong assumption because it is unclear if this is a reliable generative model for producing new training samples. In this paper, we provide a novel Bayesian formulation to data augmentation, where new annotated training points are treated as missing variables and generated based on the distribution learned from the training set. For learning, we introduce a theoretically sound algorithm --- generalised Monte Carlo expectation maximisation, and demonstrate one possible implementation via an extension of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Classification results on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show the better performance of our proposed method compared to the current dominant data augmentation approach mentioned above --- the results also show that our approach produces better classification results than similar GAN models.