This contribution demonstrates the feasibility of applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on images of EPAL pallet blocks for dataset enhancement in the context of re-identification. For many industrial applications of re-identification methods, datasets of sufficient volume would otherwise be unattainable in non-laboratory settings. Using a state-of-the-art GAN architecture, namely CycleGAN, images of pallet blocks rotated to their left-hand side were generated from images of visually centered pallet blocks, based on images of rotated pallet blocks that were recorded as part of a previously recorded and published dataset. In this process, the unique chipwood pattern of the pallet block surface structure was retained, only changing the orientation of the pallet block itself. By doing so, synthetic data for re-identification testing and training purposes was generated, in a manner that is distinct from ordinary data augmentation. In total, 1,004 new images of pallet blocks were generated. The quality of the generated images was gauged using a perspective classifier that was trained on the original images and then applied to the synthetic ones, comparing the accuracy between the two sets of images. The classification accuracy was 98% for the original images and 92% for the synthetic images. In addition, the generated images were also used in a re-identification task, in order to re-identify original images based on synthetic ones. The accuracy in this scenario was up to 88% for synthetic images, compared to 96% for original images. Through this evaluation, it is established, whether or not a generated pallet block image closely resembles its original counterpart.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications reshape the trend of warehouse monitoring systems allowing them to track and locate massive numbers of logistic entities in real-time. To support the tasks, classic Radio Frequency (RF)-based localization approaches (e.g. triangulation and trilateration) confront challenges due to multi-path fading and signal loss in noisy warehouse environment. In this paper, we investigate machine learning methods using a new grid-based WSN platform called Sensor Floor that can overcome the issues. Sensor Floor consists of 345 nodes installed across the floor of our logistic research hall with dual-band RF and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors. Our goal is to localize all logistic entities, for this study we use a mobile robot. We record distributed sensing measurements of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and IMU values as the dataset and position tracking from Vicon system as the ground truth. The asynchronous collected data is pre-processed and trained using Random Forest and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN model with regularization outperforms the Random Forest in terms of localization accuracy with aproximate 15 cm. Moreover, the CNN architecture can be configured flexibly depending on the scenario in the warehouse. The hardware, software and the CNN architecture of the Sensor Floor are open-source under https://github.com/FLW-TUDO/sensorfloor.

This work aims at showing that it is feasible and safe to use a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) indoors alongside humans. UAVs are increasingly being integrated under the Industry 4.0 framework. UAV swarms are primarily deployed outdoors in civil and military applications, but the opportunities for using them in manufacturing and supply chain management are immense. There is extensive research on UAV technology, e.g., localization, control, and computer vision, but less research on the practical application of UAVs in industry. UAV technology could improve data collection and monitoring, enhance decision-making in an Internet of Things framework and automate time-consuming and redundant tasks in the industry. However, there is a gap between the technological developments of UAVs and their integration into the supply chain. Therefore, this work focuses on automating the task of transporting packages utilizing a swarm of small UAVs operating alongside humans. MoCap system, ROS, and unity are used for localization, inter-process communication and visualization. Multiple experiments are performed with the UAVs in wander and swarm mode in a warehouse like environment.

Human-technology collaboration relies on verbal and non-verbal communication. Machines must be able to detect and understand the movements of humans to facilitate non-verbal communication. In this article, we introduce ongoing research on human activity recognition in intralogistics, and show how it can be applied in industrial settings. We show how semantic attributes can be used to describe human activities flexibly and how context informantion increases the performance of classifiers to recognise them automatically. Beyond that, we present a concept based on a cyber-physical twin that can reduce the effort and time necessary to create a training dataset for human activity recognition. In the future, it will be possible to train a classifier solely with realistic simulation data, while maintaining or even increasing the classification performance.

Scene understanding is essential in determining how intelligent robotic grasping and manipulation could get. It is a problem that can be approached using different techniques: seen object segmentation, unseen object segmentation, or 6D pose estimation. These techniques can even be extended to multi-view. Most of the work on these problems depends on synthetic datasets due to the lack of real datasets that are big enough for training and merely use the available real datasets for evaluation. This encourages us to introduce a new dataset (called DoPose-6D). The dataset contains annotations for 6D Pose estimation, object segmentation, and multi-view annotations, which serve all the pre-mentioned techniques. The dataset contains two types of scenes bin picking and tabletop, with the primary motive for this dataset collection being bin picking. We illustrate the effect of this dataset in the context of unseen object segmentation and provide some insights on mixing synthetic and real data for the training. We train a Mask R-CNN model that is practical to be used in industry and robotic grasping applications. Finally, we show how our dataset boosted the performance of a Mask R-CNN model. Our DoPose-6D dataset, trained network models, pipeline code, and ROS driver are available online.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

Remote sensing imagery provides comprehensive views of the Earth, where different sensors collect complementary data at different spatial scales. Large, pretrained models are commonly finetuned with imagery that is heavily augmented to mimic different conditions and scales, with the resulting models used for various tasks with imagery from a range of spatial scales. Such models overlook scale-specific information in the data. In this paper, we present Scale-MAE, a pretraining method that explicitly learns relationships between data at different, known scales throughout the pretraining process. Scale-MAE pretrains a network by masking an input image at a known input scale, where the area of the Earth covered by the image determines the scale of the ViT positional encoding, not the image resolution. Scale-MAE encodes the masked image with a standard ViT backbone, and then decodes the masked image through a bandpass filter to reconstruct low/high frequency images at lower/higher scales. We find that tasking the network with reconstructing both low/high frequency images leads to robust multiscale representations for remote sensing imagery. Scale-MAE achieves an average of a $5.0\%$ non-parametric kNN classification improvement across eight remote sensing datasets compared to current state-of-the-art and obtains a $0.9$ mIoU to $3.8$ mIoU improvement on the SpaceNet building segmentation transfer task for a range of evaluation scales.

With an ever-growing number of parameters defining increasingly complex networks, Deep Learning has led to several breakthroughs surpassing human performance. As a result, data movement for these millions of model parameters causes a growing imbalance known as the memory wall. Neuromorphic computing is an emerging paradigm that confronts this imbalance by performing computations directly in analog memories. On the software side, the sequential Backpropagation algorithm prevents efficient parallelization and thus fast convergence. A novel method, Direct Feedback Alignment, resolves inherent layer dependencies by directly passing the error from the output to each layer. At the intersection of hardware/software co-design, there is a demand for developing algorithms that are tolerable to hardware nonidealities. Therefore, this work explores the interrelationship of implementing bio-plausible learning in-situ on neuromorphic hardware, emphasizing energy, area, and latency constraints. Using the benchmarking framework DNN+NeuroSim, we investigate the impact of hardware nonidealities and quantization on algorithm performance, as well as how network topologies and algorithm-level design choices can scale latency, energy and area consumption of a chip. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to compare the impact of different learning algorithms on Compute-In-Memory-based hardware and vice versa. The best results achieved for accuracy remain Backpropagation-based, notably when facing hardware imperfections. Direct Feedback Alignment, on the other hand, allows for significant speedup due to parallelization, reducing training time by a factor approaching N for N-layered networks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become commonplace to solve routine everyday tasks. Because of the exponential growth in medical imaging data volume and complexity, the workload on radiologists is steadily increasing. We project that the gap between the number of imaging exams and the number of expert radiologist readers required to cover this increase will continue to expand, consequently introducing a demand for AI-based tools that improve the efficiency with which radiologists can comfortably interpret these exams. AI has been shown to improve efficiency in medical-image generation, processing, and interpretation, and a variety of such AI models have been developed across research labs worldwide. However, very few of these, if any, find their way into routine clinical use, a discrepancy that reflects the divide between AI research and successful AI translation. To address the barrier to clinical deployment, we have formed MONAI Consortium, an open-source community which is building standards for AI deployment in healthcare institutions, and developing tools and infrastructure to facilitate their implementation. This report represents several years of weekly discussions and hands-on problem solving experience by groups of industry experts and clinicians in the MONAI Consortium. We identify barriers between AI-model development in research labs and subsequent clinical deployment and propose solutions. Our report provides guidance on processes which take an imaging AI model from development to clinical implementation in a healthcare institution. We discuss various AI integration points in a clinical Radiology workflow. We also present a taxonomy of Radiology AI use-cases. Through this report, we intend to educate the stakeholders in healthcare and AI (AI researchers, radiologists, imaging informaticists, and regulators) about cross-disciplinary challenges and possible solutions.

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks using frozen language models (LM) and retrieval models (RM). Existing work has combined these in simple "retrieve-then-read" pipelines in which the RM retrieves passages that are inserted into the LM prompt. To begin to fully realize the potential of frozen LMs and RMs, we propose Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), a framework that relies on passing natural language texts in sophisticated pipelines between an LM and an RM. DSP can express high-level programs that bootstrap pipeline-aware demonstrations, search for relevant passages, and generate grounded predictions, systematically breaking down problems into small transformations that the LM and RM can handle more reliably. We have written novel DSP programs for answering questions in open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational settings, establishing in early evaluations new state-of-the-art in-context learning results and delivering 37-200%, 8-40%, and 80-290% relative gains against vanilla LMs, a standard retrieve-then-read pipeline, and a contemporaneous self-ask pipeline, respectively.