USVs on ViCoS Lab

A water-obstacle separation and refinement network for unmanned surface vehicles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Obstacle detection by semantic segmentation shows a great promise for autonomous navigation in unmanned surface vehicles (USV). However, existing methods suffer from poor estimation of the water edge in presence of visual ambiguities, poor detection of small obstacles and high false-positive rate on water reflections and wakes. We propose a new deep encoder-decoder architecture, a water-obstacle separation and refinement network (WaSR), to address these issues. Detection and water edge accuracy are improved by a novel decoder that gradually fuses inertial information from IMU with the visual features from the encoder. In addition, a novel loss function is designed to increase the separation between water and obstacle features early on in the network. Subsequently, the capacity of the remaining layers in the decoder is better utilised, leading to a significant reduction in false positives and increased true positives. Experimental results show that WaSR outperforms the current state-of-the-art by a large margin, yielding a 14% increase in F-measure over the second-best method.

Obstacle Detection for USVs by Joint Stereo-View Semantic Segmentation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We propose a stereo-based obstacle detection approach for unmanned surface vehicles. Obstacle detection is cast as a scene semantic segmentation problem in which pixels are assigned a probability of belonging to water or non-water regions. We extend a single-view model to a stereo system by adding a constraint which prefers consistent class labels assignment to pixels in the left and right camera images corresponding to the same parts of a 3D scene. Our approach jointly fits a semantic model to both images, leading to an improved class-label posterior map from which obstacles and water edge are extracted. In overall F-measure, our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art monocular approach by 0.495, a monocular CNN by 0.798 and their stereo extensions by 0.059 and 0.515, respectively on the task of obstacle detection while running real-time on a single CPU.

The MaSTr1325 dataset for training deep USV obstacle detection models

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The progress of obstacle detection via semantic segmentation on unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has been significantly lagging behind the developments in the related field of autonomous cars. The reason is the lack of large curated training datasets from USV domain required for development of data-hungry deep CNNs. This paper addresses this issue by presenting MaSTr1325, a marine semantic segmentation training dataset tailored for development of obstacle detection methods in small-sized coastal USVs. The dataset contains 1325 diverse images captured over a two year span with a real USV, covering a range of realistic conditions encountered in a coastal surveillance task. The images are per-pixel semantically labeled. The dataset exceeds previous attempts in this domain in size, scene complexity and domain realism. In addition, a dataset augmentation protocol is proposed to address slight appearance differences of the images in the training set and those in deployment. The accompanying experimental evaluation provides a detailed analysis of popular deep architectures, annotation accuracy and influence of the training set size. MaSTr1325 will be released to reaserch community to facilitate progress in obstacle detection for USVs.