In the context of robotics and automation, learning from demonstration (LfD) is the paradigm in which robots acquire new skills by learning to imitate an expert. The choice of LfD over other robot ...

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Recent Advances in Robot Learning from Demonstration

We demonstrate the first application of deep reinforcement learning to autonomous driving. From randomly initialised parameters, our model is able to learn a policy for lane following in a handful of training episodes using a single monocular image as input. We provide a general and easy to obtain reward: the distance travelled by the vehicle without the safety driver taking control. We use a continuous, model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm, with all exploration and optimisation performed on-vehicle. This demonstrates a new framework for autonomous driving which moves away from reliance on defined logical rules, mapping, and direct supervision. We discuss the challenges and opportunities to scale this approach to a broader range of autonomous driving tasks.

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Learning to Drive in a Day

Hand gestures are a form of nonverbal communication that can be used in several fields such as communication between deaf-mute people, robot control, human–computer interaction (HCI), home automation and medical applications. Research papers based on hand gestures have adopted many different techniques, including those based on instrumented sensor technology and computer vision. In other words, the hand sign can be classified under many headings, such as posture and gesture, as well as dynamic and static, or a hybrid of the two. This paper focuses on a review of the literature on hand gesture techniques and introduces their merits and limitations under different circumstances. In addition, it tabulates the performance of these methods, focusing on computer vision techniques that deal with the similarity and difference points, technique of hand segmentation used, classification algorithms and drawbacks, number and types of gestures, dataset used, detection range (distance) and type of camera used. This paper is a thorough general overview of hand gesture methods with a brief discussion of some possible applications.

https://www.mdpi.com/2313-433X/6/8/73/pdf

Hand Gesture Recognition Based on Computer Vision: A Review of Techniques

Approximate model predictive building control via machine learning

Civilian drones are soon expected to be used in a wide variety of tasks, such as aerial surveillance, delivery, or monitoring of existing architectures. Nevertheless, their deployment in urban environments has so far been limited. Indeed, in unstructured and highly dynamic scenarios, drones face numerous challenges to navigate autonomously in a feasible and safe way. In contrast to traditional “map-localize-plan” methods, this letter explores a data-driven approach to cope with the above challenges. To accomplish this, we propose DroNet: a convolutional neural network that can safely drive a drone through the streets of a city. Designed as a fast eight-layers residual network, DroNet produces two outputs for each single input image: A steering angle to keep the drone navigating while avoiding obstacles, and a collision probability to let the UAV recognize dangerous situations and promptly react to them. The challenge is however to collect enough data in an unstructured outdoor environment such as a city. Clearly, having an expert pilot providing training trajectories is not an option given the large amount of data required and, above all, the risk that it involves for other vehicles or pedestrians moving in the streets. Therefore, we propose to train a UAV from data collected by cars and bicycles, which, already integrated into the urban environment, would not endanger other vehicles and pedestrians. Although trained on city streets from the viewpoint of urban vehicles, the navigation policy learned by DroNet is highly generalizable. Indeed, it allows a UAV to successfully fly at relative high altitudes and even in indoor environments, such as parking lots and corridors. To share our findings with the robotics community, we publicly release all our datasets, code, and trained networks.

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DroNet: Learning to Fly by Driving

Human-computer interaction based on visual hand-gesture recognition using volumetric spatiograms of local binary patterns

Visual hand-gesture recognition is being increasingly desired for human-computer interaction interfaces. In many applications, hands only occupy about 10% of the image, whereas the most of it contains background, human face, and human body. Spatial localization of the hands in such scenarios could be a challenging task and ground truth bounding boxes need to be provided for training, which is usually not accessible. However, the location of the hand is not a requirement when the criteria is just the recognition of a gesture to command a consumer electronics device, such as mobiles phones and TVs. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network is proposed to directly classify hand gestures in images without any segmentation or detection stage that could discard the irrelevant not-hand areas. The designed hand-gesture recognition network can classify seven sorts of hand gestures in a user-independent manner and on real time, achieving an accuracy of 97.1% in the dataset with simple backgrounds and 85.3% in the dataset with complex backgrounds.

/pdf/tiny-hand-gesture-recognition-without-localization-via-a-3hame8zmoi.pdf

Tiny hand gesture recognition without localization via a deep convolutional network

Automatic visual object counting and video surveillance have important applications for home and business environments, such as security and management of access points. However, in order to obtain a satisfactory performance these technologies need professional and expensive hardware, complex installations and setups, and the supervision of qualified workers. In this paper, an efficient visual detection and tracking framework is proposed for the tasks of object counting and surveillance, which meets the requirements of the consumer electronics: off-the-shelf equipment, easy installation and configuration, and unsupervised working conditions. This is accomplished by a novel Bayesian tracking model that can manage multimodal distributions without explicitly computing the association between tracked objects and detections. In addition, it is robust to erroneous, distorted and missing detections. The proposed algorithm is compared with a recent work, also focused on consumer electronics, proving its superior performance.

/pdf/an-efficient-multiple-object-detection-and-tracking-515v6wck5p.pdf

An efficient multiple object detection and tracking framework for automatic counting and video surveillance applications

Hand gestures are one of the main alternatives for Human-Computer Interaction. For this reason, a hand gesture recognition system using near-infrared imagery acquired by a Leap Motion sensor is proposed. The recognition system directly characterizes the hand gesture by computing a global image descriptor, called Depth Spatiograms of Quantized Patterns, without any hand segmentation stage. To deal with the high dimensionality of the image descriptor, a Compressive Sensing framework is applied, obtaining a manageable image feature vector that almost preserves the original information. Finally, the resulting reduced image descriptors are analyzed by a set of Support Vectors Machines to identify the performed gesture independently of the precise hand location in the image. Promising results have been achieved using a new hand-based near-infrared database.

/pdf/hand-gesture-recognition-using-infrared-imagery-provided-by-1ple4vpct7.pdf

Carlos R. del-Blanco

Papers

DroNet: Learning to Fly by Driving

Human-computer interaction based on visual hand-gesture recognition using volumetric spatiograms of local binary patterns

Tiny hand gesture recognition without localization via a deep convolutional network

An efficient multiple object detection and tracking framework for automatic counting and video surveillance applications

Hand Gesture Recognition Using Infrared Imagery Provided by Leap Motion Controller