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In service robotics, tasks without the involvement of objects are barely applicable, like in searching, fetching or delivering tasks. Service robots are supposed to capture efficiently object related information in real world scenes while for instance considering clutter and noise, and also being flexible and scalable to memorize a large set of objects. Besides object perception tasks like object recognition where the object’s identity is analyzed, object categorization is an important visual object perception cue that associates unknown object instances based on their e.g. appearance or shape to a corresponding category. We present a pipeline from the detection of object candidates in a domestic scene over the description to the final shape categorization of detected candidates. In order to detect object related information in cluttered domestic environments an object detection method is proposed that copes with multiple plane and object occurrences like in cluttered scenes with shelves. Further a surface reconstruction method based on Growing Neural Gas (GNG) in combination with a shape distribution-based descriptor is proposed to reflect shape characteristics of object candidates. Beneficial properties provided by the GNG such as smoothing and denoising effects support a stable description of the object candidates which also leads towards a more stable learning of categories. Based on the presented descriptor a dictionary approach combined with a supervised shape learner is presented to learn prediction models of shape categories.
Experimental results, of different shapes related to domestically appearing object shape categories such as cup, can, box, bottle, bowl, plate and ball, are shown. A classification accuracy of about 90% and a sequential execution time of lesser than two seconds for the categorization of an unknown object is achieved which proves the reasonableness of the proposed system design. Additional results are shown towards object tracking and false positive handling to enhance the robustness of the categorization. Also an initial approach towards incremental shape category learning is proposed that learns a new category based on the set of previously learned shape categories.
The objective of this thesis is to implement a computer game based motivation system for maximal strength testing on the Biodex System 3 Isokinetic Dynamometer. The prototype game has been designed to improve the peak torque produced in an isometric knee extensor strength test. An extensive analysis is performed on a torque data set from a previous study. The torque responses for five second long maximal voluntary contractions of the knee extensor are analyzed to understand torque response characteristics of different subjects. The parameters identifed in the data analysis are used in the implementation of the 'Shark and School of Fish' game. The behavior of the game for different torque responses is analyzed on a different torque data set from the previous study. The evaluation shows that the game rewards and motivates continuously over a repetition to reach the peak torque value. The evaluation also shows that the game rewards the user more if he overcomes a baseline torque value within the first second and then gradually increase the torque to reach peak torque.
In the eld of accessing and visualization mobile sensors and their recorded data, di erent approaches were realized. The OGC1 Sensor observation Service supplies a standard to access these information, stored on servers. To be able to access these servers, an interface must be developed and implemented. The result should be a con gurable development framework for web-based GIS clients supporting the OGC sensor observation services. In particular the framework should allow continuous position updates of mobile sensors. Visualization features like charts, bounding boxes of sensors and data series should be included.
This thesis work presents the implementation and validation of image processing problems in hardware to estimate the performance and precision gain. It compares the implementation for the addressed problem on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with a software implementation for a General Purpose Processor (GPP) architecture. For both solutions the implementation costs for their development is an important aspect in the validation. The analysis of the flexibility and extendability that can be achieved by a modular implementation for the FPGA design was another major aspect. This work is based upon approaches from previous work, which included the detection of Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) in static images and continuous video streams [13, 15]. One addressed problem of this work is the tracking of the detected BLOBs in continuous image material. This has been implemented for the FPGA platform and the GPP architecture. Both approaches have been compared with respect to performance and precision. This research project is motivated by the MI6 project of the Computer Vision research group, which is located at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. The intent of the MI6 project is the tracking of a user in an immersive environment. The proposed solution is to attach a light emitting device to the user for tracking the created light dots on the projection surface of the immersive environment. Having the center points of those light dots would allow the estimation of the user’s position and orientation. One major issue that makes Computer Vision problems computationally expensive is the high amount of data that has to be processed in real-time. Therefore, one major target for the implementation was to get a processing speed of more than 30 frames per second. This would allow the system to realize feedback to the user in a response time which is faster than the human visual perception. One problem that comes with the idea of using a light emitting device to represent the user, is the precision error. Dependent on the resolution of the tracked projection surface of the immersive environment, a pixel might have a size in cm2. Having a precision error of only a few pixels, might lead to an offset in the estimated user’s position of several cm. In this research work the development and validation of a detection and tracking system for BLOBs on a Cyclone II FPGA from Altera has been realized. The system supports different input devices for the image acquisition and can perform detection and tracking for five to eight BLOBs. A further extension of the design has been evaluated and is possible with some constraints. Additional modules for compressing the image data based on run-length encoding and sub-pixel precision for the computed BLOB center-points have been designed. For the comparison of the FPGA approach for BLOB tracking a similar implementation in software using a multi-threaded approach has been realized. The system can transmit the detection or tracking results on two available communication interfaces, USB and RS232. The analysis of the hardware solution showed a similar precision for the BLOB detection and tracking as the software approach. One problem is the strong increase of the allocated resources when extending the system to process more BLOBs. With one of the applied target platforms, the DE2-70 board from Altera, the BLOB detection could be extended to process up to thirty BLOBs. The implementation of the tracking approach in hardware required much more effort than the software solution. The design of high level problems in hardware for this case are more expensive than the software implementation. The search and match steps in the tracking approach could be realized more efficiently and reliably in software. The additional pre-processing modules for sub-pixel precision and run-length-encoding helped to increase the system’s performance and precision.
This work extends the affordance-inspired robot control architecture introduced in the MACS project [35] and especially its approach to integrate symbolic planning systems given in [24] by providing methods to automated abstraction of affordances to high-level operators. It discusses how symbolic planning instances can be generated automatically based on these operators and introduces an instantiation method to execute the resulting plans. Preconditions and effects of agent behaviour are learned and represented in Gärdenfors conceptual spaces framework. Its notion of similarity is used to group behaviours to abstract operators based on the affordance-inspired, function-centred view on the environment. Ways on how the capabilities of conceptual spaces to map subsymbolic to symbolic representations to generate PDDL planning domains including affordance-based operators are discussed. During plan execution, affordance-based operators are instantiated by agent behaviour based on the situation directly before its execution. The current situation is compared to past ones and the behaviour that has been most successful in the past is applied. Execution failures can be repaired by action substitution. The concept of using contexts to dynamically change dimension salience as introduced by Gärdenfors is realized by using techniques from the field of feature selection. The approach is evaluated using a 3D simulation environment and implementations of several object manipulation behaviours.
The task of this thesis is to develop an OGC-compliant Sensor Observation Service (SOS) { a component of the SWE { for GPS related sensor data in this context. It should, in contrast to existing implementations, support full mobility of the sensors and be con gurable with respect to adding di erent kinds of sensors. In particular, mobile phones should be considered as sensors, which transmit their data to the SOS server through the transactional SOS interface.
This report presents an approach on a quadrotor dynamics stabilization based on ICP SLAM. Because the quadrotor lacks sensory information to detect its horizontal drift an additional sensor as Hokuyo-UTM has been used to perform on-line ICP-based SLAM. The obtained position estimates were used in control loops to maintain desired position and orientation of the vehicle. Such attitude parameters as height, yaw and position in space were controlled based on the laser data. As a result the quadrotor demonstrated two significant for autonomous navigation capabilities: performance of on-line SLAMon a flying vehicle and maintaining desired position in 3D space. Visual approach on optical flow based on Pyramid Lucas-Kanade algorithm has been touched and tested in different environmental conditions though hasn't been implemented in the control loop. Also the performance of the Hokuyo laser scanner and the related to it ICP SLAM algorithm have been tested in different environmental conditions indoors, outdoors and in presence of smoke. Results are presented and discussed. The requirement of performing on-line SLAM algorithm and to carry quite heavy equipment for it forced to seek a solution to increase the payload of the quadrotor with its computational power. A new hardware and distributed software architectures are therefore presented in the report.
Distributed systems comprise distributed computing systems, distributed information systems, and distributed pervasive systems. They are often very complex and their implementation is challenging. Intensive and continuous testing is indispensable to ensure reliability and high quality of a distributed system. The testing process should have a high degree of automation, not only on lower levels (i.e. unit and module testing), but also on higher testing levels (e.g. system, integration, and acceptance tests). To achieve automation on higher testing levels virtual infrastructure components (e.g. virtual machines, virtual networks) that are offered as a Service (IaaS) can be employed. The elasticity of on-demand computation resources fits well together with the varying resource demands of automated test execution.
A methodology for automated acceptance testing of distributed systems that uses virtual infrastructure is presented. It is founded on a task-oriented model that is used to abstract concurrency and asynchronous, remote communication in distributed systems. The model is used as groundwork for a domain-specific language that allows expressing tests for distributed systems in the form of scenarios. On the one hand, test scenarios are executable and, therefore, fully automated. On the other hand, test scenarios represent requirements to the system under test making an automated, example-based verification possible.
A prototypical implementation is used to apply the developed methodology in the context of two different case studies. The first case study uses RCE as an example of a distributed, workflow-driven integration environment for scientific computing. The second one uses MongoDB as an example of a document-oriented database system that offers distributed data storage through master-slave replication. The results of the experimental evaluation indicate that the developed acceptance testing methodology is a useful approach to design, build, and execute tests for distributed systems with high quality and a high degree of automation.
This work aims to create a natural language generation (NLG) base for further development of systems for automatic examination questions generation and automatic summarization in Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg and Fraunhofer IAIS, respectively. Nowadays both tasks are very relevant. The first can significantly simplify the university teachers' work and the second to be of assistance for a faster retrieval of knowledge from an excessively large amount of information that people often work with. We focus on the search for an efficient and robust approach to the controlled NLG problem. Therefore, though the initial idea of the project was the usage of the generative adversarial neural networks (GANs), we switched our attention to more robust and easily-controllable autoencoders. Thus, in this work we implement an autoencoder for unsupervised discovery of latent space representations of text, and show the ability of the system to generate new sentences based on this latent space. Apart from that, we apply Gaussian mixture techniques in order to obtain meaningful text clusters and thereby try to create a tool that would allow us to generate sentences relevant to the semantics of the Gaussian clusters, e.g. positive or negative reviews or examination questions on certain topic. The developed system is tested on several datasets and compared to GANs' performance.
This thesis investigates the benefit of rubrics for grading short answers using an active learning mechanism. Automating short answer grading using Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the active research areas in the education domain. This could save time for the evaluator and invest more time in preparing for the lecture. Most of the research on short answer grading was treated as a similarity task between reference and student answers. However, grading based on reference answers does not account for partial grades and does not provide feedback. Also, the grading is automatic that tries to replace the evaluator. Hence, using rubrics for short answer grading with active learning eliminates the drawbacks mentioned earlier.
Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated on the Mohler dataset, popularly used to benchmark the methodology. This phase is used to determine the parameters for the proposed approach. Therefore, the approach with the selected parameter exceeds the performance of current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods resulting in the Pearson correlation value of 0.63 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.85. The proposed approach has surpassed the SOTA methods by almost 4%.
Finally, the benchmarked approach is used to grade the short answer based on rubrics instead of reference answers. The proposed approach evaluates short answers from Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) dataset to provide scores and feedback (formative assessment) based on the rubrics. The average performance of the dataset results in the Pearson correlation value of 0.61 and RMSE of 0.83. Thus, this research has proven that rubrics-based grading achieves formative assessment without compromising performance. In addition, the rubrics have the advantage of generalizability to all answers.
Object detection concerns the classification and localization of objects in an image. To cope with changes in the environment, such as when new classes are added or a new domain is encountered, the detector needs to update itself with the new information while retaining knowledge learned in the past. Previous works have shown that training the detector solely on new data would produce a severe "forgetting" effect, in which the performance on past tasks deteriorates through each new learning phase. However, in many cases, storing and accessing past data is not possible due to privacy concerns or storage constraints. This project aims to investigate promising continual learning strategies for object detection without storing and accessing past training images and labels. We show that by utilizing the pseudo-background trick to deal with missing labels, and knowledge distillation to deal with missing data, the forgetting effect can be significantly reduced in both class-incremental and domain-incremental scenarios. Furthermore, an integration of a small latent replay buffer can result in a positive backward transfer, indicating the enhancement of past knowledge when new knowledge is learned.
Grid services will form the base for future computational Grids. Web Services, have been extended to build Grid services. Grid Services are dened in the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). The Globus Alliance has released a Web Service Resource Framework, which is still under development and which is still missing vital parts. One of them is a Concept that allows Grid-Service Requests to securely traverse Firewalls, and its realization. This Thesis aims at the development and realization of a detailed Concept for an Application Level Gateway for Grid services, based on an existing rough concept. This approach should enable a strict division between a local network and the Internet. The internet is considered as a untrusted site and the local network is considered as a trusted site. Grid resources are placed in the internet as well as in the local network. This means that the possibility to communicate through a Firewall is essential. Some further protocols like Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) and the Grid File Transfer Protocol (GridFTP) must be able to traverse the network borders securely as well, while no further actions must be taken from the user side. The German Federal Oce for Information Security (BSI) proposes a Firewall - Application Level Gateway (ALG) - Firewall solution to the German Aerospace Center (DLR) where this Thesis is written, as a principle approach. In this approach, the local network is divided from the Internet with two rewalls. Between those rewalls is a demilitarized zone (DMZ), where computers may be placed, which can be accessed from the Internet and from the local network. An ALG which is placed in this DMZ should represent the local Grid nodes to the Internet and it should act as a client to the local nodes. All Grid service requests must be directed to the ALG instead of the protected Grid nodes. The ALG then checks and validates the requests on the application level (OSI layer 7). Requests that pose no security threat and fulll certain criteria will then be forwarded to the local Grid nodes. The responses from the local Grid nodes are checked and validated by the ALG as well.
As cameras are ubiquitous in autonomous systems, object detection is a crucial task. Object detectors are widely used in applications such as autonomous driving, healthcare, and robotics. Given an image, an object detector outputs both the bounding box coordinates as well as classification probabilities for each object detected. The state-of-the-art detectors are treated as black boxes due to their highly non-linear internal computations. Even with unprecedented advancements in detector performance, the inability to explain how their outputs are generated limits their use in safety-critical applications in particular. It is therefore crucial to explain the reason behind each detector decision in order to gain user trust, enhance detector performance, and analyze their failure.
Previous work fails to explain as well as evaluate both bounding box and classification decisions individually for various detectors. Moreover, no tools explain each detector decision, evaluate the explanations, and also identify the reasons for detector failures. This restricts the flexibility to analyze detectors. The main contribution presented here is an open-source Detector Explanation Toolkit (DExT). It is used to explain the detector decisions, evaluate the explanations, and analyze detector errors. The detector decisions are explained visually by highlighting the image pixels that most influence a particular decision. The toolkit implements the proposed approach to generate a holistic explanation for all detector decisions using certain gradient-based explanation methods. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to conduct extensive qualitative and novel quantitative evaluations of different explanation methods across various detectors. The qualitative evaluation incorporates a visual analysis of the explanations carried out by the author as well as a human-centric evaluation. The human-centric evaluation includes a user study to understand user trust in the explanations generated across various explanation methods for different detectors. Four multi-object visualization methods are provided to merge the explanations of multiple objects detected in an image as well as the corresponding detector outputs in a single image. Finally, DExT implements the procedure to analyze detector failures using the formulated approach.
The visual analysis illustrates that the ability to explain a model is more dependent on the model itself than the actual ability of the explanation method. In addition, the explanations are affected by the object explained, the decision explained, detector architecture, training data labels, and model parameters. The results of the quantitative evaluation show that the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is more faithfully explained compared to other detectors regardless of the explanation methods. In addition, a single explanation method cannot generate more faithful explanations than other methods for both the bounding box and the classification decision across different detectors. Both the quantitative and human-centric evaluations identify that SmoothGrad with Guided Backpropagation (GBP) provides more trustworthy explanations among selected methods across all detectors. Finally, a convex polygon-based multi-object visualization method provides more human-understandable visualization than other methods.
The author expects that DExT will motivate practitioners to evaluate object detectors from the interpretability perspective by explaining both bounding box and classification decisions.
Distributed computing environments allow collaborative problem solving across teams and organisations. A fundamental precondition for collaboration is the ability to find available participants and be able to exchange information. One way to approach this conceptual formulation are central directories or registry services. A major disadvantage of centralized components is, that they limit the flexibility to form ad hoc networks that are targeted to solve a specific problem. To facilitate flexible and dynamic collaborations, ideas from decentralized and self-organising networks can be combined with concepts of service oriented computing. This project aims to investigate potential solutions for dynamic discovery of network participants and outlines how to manage challenges associated with the development of a discovery protocol for distributed systems. During the course of this project a prototypical implementation was created that integrates into the open source distributed, collaborative problem solving environment RCE [9]. It is currently developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) but is planned to make the framework available to broader community.
Estimation of Prediction Uncertainty for Semantic Scene Labeling Using Bayesian Approximation
(2018)
With the advancement in technology, autonomous and assisted driving are close to being reality. A key component of such systems is the understanding of the surrounding environment. This understanding about the environment can be attained by performing semantic labeling of the driving scenes. Existing deep learning based models have been developed over the years that outperform classical image processing algorithms for the task of semantic labeling. However, the existing models only produce semantic predictions and do not provide a measure of uncertainty about the predictions. Hence, this work focuses on developing a deep learning based semantic labeling model that can produce semantic predictions and their corresponding uncertainties. Autonomous driving needs a real-time operating model, however the Full Resolution Residual Network (FRRN) [4] architecture, which is found as the best performing architecture during literature search, is not able to satisfy this condition. Hence, a small network, similar to FRRN, has been developed and used in this work. Based on the work of [13], the developed network is then extended by adding dropout layers and the dropouts are used during testing to perform approximate Bayesian inference. The existing works on uncertainties, do not have quantitative metrics to evaluate the quality of uncertainties estimated by a model. Hence, the area under curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves is proposed and used as an evaluation metric in this work. Further, a comparative analysis about the influence of dropout layer position, drop probability and the number of samples, on the quality of uncertainty estimation is performed. Finally, based on the insights gained from the analysis, a model with optimal configuration of dropout is developed. It is then evaluated on the Cityscape dataset and shown to be outperforming the baseline model with an AUC-ROC of about 90%, while the latter having AUC-ROC of about 80%.
Nowadays perception is still an up-to-date scienti fic issue on a mobile robot system. This thesis introduces an approach on how to recognize objects, namely numbers, using a digital camera on a Volksbot robot. The robot used in this thesis has been specifi cally designed for the SICK robot day. The development of the vision algorithm was done in two stages: the region of interest detection and the actual number recognition. Diff erent algorithms had been tested and evaluated and the Canny edge detector with contour finding has been proven to be the best choice for the region of interest detection and the Tesseract OCR engine was the best decision for number recognition. To integrate the vision component on an existing robot system, ROS was used. This thesis also discusses the integration of the EPOS motor controller into ROS.
Machine learning-based solutions are frequently adapted in several applications that require big data in operations. The performance of a model that is deployed into operations is subject to degradation due to unanticipated changes in the flow of input data. Hence, monitoring data drift becomes essential to maintain the model’s desired performance. Based on the conducted review of the literature on drift detection, statistical hypothesis testing enables to investigate whether incoming data is drifting from training data. Because Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) have shown to be reliable distance measures between multivariate distributions in the literature review, both were selected from several existing techniques for experimentation. For the scope of this work, the image classification use case was experimented with using the Stream-51 dataset. Based on the results from different drift experiments, both MMD and KS showed high Area Under Curve values. However, KS exhibited faster performance than MMD with fewer false positives. Furthermore, the results showed that using the pre-trained ResNet-18 for feature extraction maintained the high performance of the experimented drift detectors. Furthermore, the results showed that the performance of the drift detectors highly depends on the sample sizes of the reference (training) data and the test data that flow into the pipeline’s monitor. Finally, the results also showed that if the test data is a mixture of drifting and non-drifting data, the performance of the drift detectors does not depend on how the drifting data are scattered with the non-drifting ones, but rather their amount in the test set
Neural network based object detectors are able to automatize many difficult, tedious tasks. However, they are usually slow and/or require powerful hardware. One main reason is called Batch Normalization (BN) [1], which is an important method for building these detectors. Recent studies present a potential replacement called Self-normalizing Neural Network (SNN) [2], which at its core is a special activation function named Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU). This replacement seems to have most of BNs benefits while requiring less computational power. Nonetheless, it is uncertain that SELU and neural network based detectors are compatible with one another. An evaluation of SELU incorporated networks would help clarify that uncertainty. Such evaluation is performed through series of tests on different neural networks. After the evaluation, it is concluded that, while indeed faster, SELU is still not as good as BN for building complex object detector networks.
High-dimensional and multi-variate data from dynamical systems such as turbulent flows and wind turbines can be analyzed with deep learning due to its capacity to learn representations in lower-dimensional manifolds. Two challenges of interest arise from data generated from these systems, namely, how to anticipate wind turbine failures and how to better understand air flow through car ventilation systems. There are deep neural network architectures that can project data into a lower-dimensional space with the goal of identifying and understanding patterns that are not distinguishable in the original dimensional space. Learning data representations in lower dimensions via non-linear mappings allows one to perform data compression, data clustering (for anomaly detection), data reconstruction and synthetic data generation.
In this work, we explore the potential that variational autoencoders (VAE) have to learn low-dimensional data representations in order to tackle the problems posed by the two dynamical systems mentioned above. A VAE is a neural network architecture that combines the mechanisms of the standard autoencoder and variational bayes. The goal here is to train a neural network to minimize a loss function defined by a reconstruction term together with a variational term defined as a Kulback-Leibler (KL) divergence.
The report discusses the results obtained for the two different data domains: wind turbine time series and turbulence data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.
We report on the reconstruction, clustering and unsupervised anomaly detection of wind turbine multi-variate time series data using a variant of a VAE called Variational Recurrent Autoencoder (VRAE). We trained a VRAE to cluster normal and abnormal wind turbine series (two class problem) as well as normal and multiple abnormal series (multi-class problem). We found that the model is capable of distinguishing between normal and abnormal cases by reducing the dimensionality of the input data and projecting it to two dimensions using techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). A set of anomaly scoring methods is applied on top of these latent vectors in order to compute unsupervised clustering. We have achieved an accuracy of up to 96% with the KM eans + + algorithm.
We also report the data reconstruction and generation results of two dimensional turbulence slices corresponding to CFD simulation of a HVAC air duct. For this, we have trained a Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). We have found that the model is capable of reconstructing laminar flows up to a certain degree of resolution as well generating synthetic turbulence data from the learned latent distribution.
The introduction of gestures as a supplementary input modality has become of increasing interest to human computer interaction design, especially for 3D computer environments. This thesis describes the concepts and development of a gesture recognition system based on the machine learning technique of Hidden Markov Models. Well-known from the field of speech recognition, this statistical method is employed in this thesis to represent and recognize predefined gestures. Within this work, gestures are defined as symbols, such as simple geometric shapes or Roman letters. They are extracted from a stream of three-dimensional optical tracking data which is resampled, reduced to 2D and quantized to be used as input to discrete Hidden Markov Models. A set of prerecorded training data is used to learn the parameters of the models and recognition is achieved by evaluating the trained models. The devised system was used to augment an existing virtual reality prototype application which serves as a demonstration and development platform for the VRGeo consortium. The consortium's goal is to investigate and utilize the benefits of virtual reality technology for the oil and gas industry. An isolated test of the system with seven gestures showed accuracies of up to 98.57% and the review from experts in the fields of virtual reality and geophysics was predominantly positive.