We present a data-driven framework to automate the vectorization and machine interpretation of 2D engineering part drawings. In industrial settings, most manufacturing engineers still rely on manual reads to identify the topological and manufacturing requirements from drawings submitted by designers. The interpretation process is laborious and time-consuming, which severely inhibits the efficiency of part quotation and manufacturing tasks. While recent advances in image-based computer vision methods have demonstrated great potential in interpreting natural images through semantic segmentation approaches, the application of such methods in parsing engineering technical drawings into semantically accurate components remains a significant challenge. The severe pixel sparsity in engineering drawings also restricts the effective featurization of image-based data-driven methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose a deep learning based framework that predicts the semantic type of each vectorized component. Taking a raster image as input, we vectorize all components through thinning, stroke tracing, and cubic bezier fitting. Then a graph of such components is generated based on the connectivity between the components. Finally, a graph convolutional neural network is trained on this graph data to identify the semantic type of each component. We test our framework in the context of semantic segmentation of text, dimension and, contour components in engineering drawings. Results show that our method yields the best performance compared to recent image, and graph-based segmentation methods.

Researchers are doing intensive work on satellite images due to the information it contains with the development of computer vision algorithms and the ease of accessibility to satellite images. Building segmentation of satellite images can be used for many potential applications such as city, agricultural, and communication network planning. However, since no dataset exists for every region, the model trained in a region must gain generality. In this study, we trained several models in China and post-processing work was done on the best model selected among them. These models are evaluated in the Chicago region of the INRIA dataset. As can be seen from the results, although state-of-art results in this area have not been achieved, the results are promising. We aim to present our initial experimental results of a building segmentation from satellite images in this study.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a semi-supervised segmentation method for extracting roads from sattelite images. Artificial Neural Networks and image segmentation methods are among the most successful methods for extracting road data from satellite images. However, these models require large amounts of training data from different regions to achieve high accuracy rates. In cases where this data needs to be of more quantity or quality, it is a standard method to train deep neural networks by transferring knowledge from annotated data obtained from different sources. This study proposes a method that performs path segmentation with semi-supervised learning methods. A semi-supervised field adaptation method based on pseudo-labeling and Minimum Class Confusion method has been proposed, and it has been observed to increase performance in targeted datasets.

Autonomous vehicle (AV) algorithms need to be tested extensively in order to make sure the vehicle and the passengers will be safe while using it after the implementation. Testing these algorithms in real world create another important safety critical point. Real world testing is also subjected to limitations such as logistic limitations to carry or drive the vehicle to a certain location. For this purpose, hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations as well as virtual environments such as CARLA and LG SVL are used widely. This paper discusses a method that combines the real vehicle with the virtual world, called vehicle in virtual environment (VVE). This method projects the vehicle location and heading into a virtual world for desired testing, and transfers back the information from sensors in the virtual world to the vehicle. As a result, while vehicle is moving in the real world, it simultaneously moves in the virtual world and obtains the situational awareness via multiple virtual sensors. This would allow testing in a safe environment with the real vehicle while providing some additional benefits on vehicle dynamics fidelity, logistics limitations and passenger experience testing. The paper also demonstrates an example case study where path following and the virtual sensors are utilized to test a radar based stopping algorithm.

Unsupervised object discovery aims to localize objects in images, while removing the dependence on annotations required by most deep learning-based methods. To address this problem, we propose a fully unsupervised, bottom-up approach, for multiple objects discovery. The proposed approach is a two-stage framework. First, instances of object parts are segmented by using the intra-image similarity between self-supervised local features. The second step merges and filters the object parts to form complete object instances. The latter is performed by two CNN models that capture semantic information on objects from the entire dataset. We demonstrate that the pseudo-labels generated by our method provide a better precision-recall trade-off than existing single and multiple objects discovery methods. In particular, we provide state-of-the-art results for both unsupervised class-agnostic object detection and unsupervised image segmentation.

Extracting building heights from satellite images is an active research area used in many fields such as telecommunications, city planning, etc. Many studies utilize DSM (Digital Surface Models) generated with lidars or stereo images for this purpose. Predicting the height of the buildings using only RGB images is challenging due to the insufficient amount of data, low data quality, variations of building types, different angles of light and shadow, etc. In this study, we present an instance segmentation-based building height extraction method to predict building masks with their respective heights from a single RGB satellite image. We used satellite images with building height annotations of certain cities along with an open-source satellite dataset with the transfer learning approach. We reached, the bounding box mAP 59, the mask mAP 52.6, and the average accuracy value of 70% for buildings belonging to each height class in our test set.

The promise of Mobile Health (mHealth) is the ability to use wearable sensors to monitor participant physiology at high frequencies during daily life to enable temporally-precise health interventions. However, a major challenge is frequent missing data. Despite a rich imputation literature, existing techniques are ineffective for the pulsative signals which comprise many mHealth applications, and a lack of available datasets has stymied progress. We address this gap with PulseImpute, the first large-scale pulsative signal imputation challenge which includes realistic mHealth missingness models, an extensive set of baselines, and clinically-relevant downstream tasks. Our baseline models include a novel transformer-based architecture designed to exploit the structure of pulsative signals. We hope that PulseImpute will enable the ML community to tackle this significant and challenging task.

The simple idea that not all things are equally difficult has surprising implications when applied in a fairness context. In this work we explore how "difficulty" is model-specific, such that different models find different parts of a dataset challenging. When difficulty correlates with group information, we term this difficulty disparity. Drawing a connection with recent work exploring the inductive bias towards simplicity of SGD-trained models, we show that when such a disparity exists, it is further amplified by commonly-used models. We quantify this amplification factor across a range of settings aiming towards a fuller understanding of the role of model bias. We also present a challenge to the simplifying assumption that "fixing" a dataset is sufficient to ensure unbiased performance.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

With water quality management processes, identifying and interpreting relationships between features, such as location and weather variable tuples, and water quality variables, such as levels of bacteria, is key to gaining insights and identifying areas where interventions should be made. There is a need for a search process to identify the locations and types of phenomena that are influencing water quality and a need to explain why the quality is being affected and which factors are most relevant. This paper addresses both of these issues through the development of a process for collecting data for features that represent a variety of variables over a spatial region, which are used for training and inference, and analysing the performance of the features using the model and Shapley values. Shapley values originated in cooperative game theory and can be used to aid in the interpretation of machine learning results. Evaluations are performed using several machine learning algorithms and water quality data from the Dublin Grand Canal basin.