Online structured learning for

Obstacle detection

CS 6784: Final project presentation

05-04-2010

Zhaoyin Jia & Adarsh Kowdle

Overview
Goal: A method which allows an autonomous robot to
detect and avoid obstacles without a prior trained
model

Approach:
Feature design
Use labeled data to decide on a good algorithm which
works.
Implement an online formulation of the algorithm on the
robot
 Data collection
Sets of video sequences captured by robot (Controlled
by user)

5 videos roughly
adding up to 9000
images
Data collection
Manually labeled each frame

Clear to go (Negative) Obstacle ahead

(Positive)
 Feature design
Color histogram of rows
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 Feature design
Line gist feature
Experiments
Train on 2 videos, test on the other 3.
Cascade all the features as feature vector
Baseline
Train an SVM as a binary classifier which takes an
independent decision on each frame
Accuracy: 79.5±0.01%
Experiments
Structured learning
Capture structure across frames – joint decision on a set
of frames
HMM – 10 frame structure
Accuracy:83.5±0.01%

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 Experiments on the Rovio: Flow Chart
Label a few
Positive previous frame
sample positive Don’t Change
(Obstacle) (False
negative)
Don’t
change
Train
Rovio Color
Test
Color
changed? Structured changed?
Start
SVM

Change

Negative
sample
(Clear) Label current
frame negative
Experiments on the Rovio
Demo Video
Conclusions
We have developed an algorithm which allows for an
autonomous robot to detect and avoid obstacles

Structured SVM achieves better performance at

capturing relationship between frames

Successfully tested it on the Rovio

Thanks!

Questions?