VASC Seminar

  Abstract: Robot-object interaction requires several key perceptual building blocks including object pose estimation, object classification, and partial-object completion. These tasks form the perceptual foundation for many higher level operations including object manipulation and world-state estimation. Most existing approaches to these problems in the context of 3D robot perception assume an existing database of objects [...]

Abstract: This talk tells two tales about image-classification systems, both of which are motivated by the real-world deployment of such systems. The first tale introduces a new convolutional neural network architecture, called multi-scale DenseNets, with the ability to adapt dynamically to computational resource limits at inference time. The network uses progressively growing multi-scale convolutions, dense [...]

Abstract: In this talk, I will describe our recent work (presented at ICCV 2017) on monocular camera based 3D geometry reconstruction of a non-rigid dynamic scene.   We aim to answer an open question in multi-view geometry, namely, "Is it possible to recover the 3D structure of a complex dynamic environment from two image frames captured by [...]

Abstract: Visual reasoning is a core capability of artificial intelligence. It is a necessity for effective communication, planning, and for question/answering tasks. In this talk, I discuss some recent explorations into visual reasoning for question/answering, game playing and dialog. I also describe our new reinforcement learning platform ELF; an Extensive, Lightweight and Flexible research platform [...]

Abstract: Google Brain Robotics vision is to leverage learning to push the field of robotics forward. As such, we have engaged in research ranging in application from navigation to grasping and approach from deep RL to learning from demonstration. Fundamentally, our research is built around the core idea of lifelong learning. Our long term goal [...]

Abstract: Person detection from vehicles has made rapid progress recently with the advent of multiple high-quality datasets of urban and highway driving, yet no large-scale benchmark has been available for the same problem in off-road or agricultural environments. In this talk, we present the NREC Agricultural Person-Detection Dataset to spur research in these environments. It [...]

Abstract: In the adaptive information gathering problem, a robot is required to select an informative sensing location using the history of measurements acquired thus far. While there is an extensive amount of prior work investigating effective practical approximations using variants of Shannon’s entropy, the efficacy of such policies heavily depends on the geometric distribution of [...]

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the task of inferring 3D structure underlying an image, in particular focusing on two questions - a) how we can plausibly obtain supervisory signal for this task, and b) what forms of representation should we pursue. I will first show that we can leverage image-based supervision to learn [...]