I want to design a neural network / ConvNet to generate a set of points on a given map, which correspond to possible positions of a robot. The map contains a lot of empty space for walls, and the robots can't be in those positions. Therefore, the network should take in the map, and generate pairs of numbers (x, y) corresponding to places on the map that is not wall. What would be an appropriate choice of neural network structure to implement this task?
The approach you might have to take will depend upon whether you wish to generalize to new unseen maps and be able to segment the map in to feasible(available for robot navigation) and infeasible (wall/other ojects/obstacles). Please be aware that you need to generate these maps dynamically if your environment will change over time(like moving obstacles/other robots/objects). For this if you have a good amount of annotated training data with maps with wall regions marked(segmented out), you could use a standard neural network based segmentation algorithm like Mask-RCNN (https://github.com/matterport/Mask_RCNN) on your dataset. Alternatively, if do not have a lot of annotated data and you just want a general purpose path planning algorithm, that can plan on a path from point A to B with out running in to obstacles you could use a MPC based obstacle avoidance algorithms as ones described in https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09633 / https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00423114.2018.1492141
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Suppose we have a set of images and labels meant for a machine-learning classification task. The problem is that these images come with a relatively short retention policy. While one could train a model online (i.e. update it with new image data every day), I'm ideally interested in a solution that can somehow retain images for training and testing.
To this end, I'm interested if there are any known techniques, for example some kind of one-way hashing on images, which obfuscates the image, but still allows for deep learning techniques on it.
I'm not an expert on this but the way I'm thinking about it is as follows: we have a NxN image I (say 1024x1024) with pixel values in P:={0,1,...,255}^3, and a one-way hash map f(I):P^(NxN) -> S. Then, when we train a convolutional neural network on I, we first map the convolutional filters via f, to then train on a high-dimensional space S. I think there's no need for f to locally-sensitive, in that pixels near each other don't need to map to values in S near each other, as long as we know how to map the convolutional filters to S. Please note that it's imperative that f is not invertible, and that the resulting stored image in S is unrecognizable.
One option for f,S is to use a convolutional neural network on I to then extract the representation of I from it's fully connected layer. This is not ideal because there's a high chance that this network won't retain the finer features needed for the classification task. So I think this rules out a CNN or auto encoder for f.
I want to use pre-trained model for the face identification. I try to use Siamese architecture which requires a few number of images. Could you give me any trained model which I can change for the Siamese architecture? How can I change the network model which I can put two images to find their similarities (I do not want to create image based on the tutorial here)? I only want to use the system for real time application. Do you have any recommendations?
I suppose you can use this model, described in Xiang Wu, Ran He, Zhenan Sun, Tieniu Tan A Light CNN for Deep Face Representation with Noisy Labels (arXiv 2015) as a a strating point for your experiments.
As for the Siamese network, what you are trying to earn is a mapping from a face image into some high dimensional vector space, in which distances between points reflects (dis)similarity between faces.
To do so, you only need one network that gets a face as an input and produce a high-dim vector as an output.
However, to train this single network using the Siamese approach, you are going to duplicate it: creating two instances of the same net (you need to explicitly link the weights of the two copies). During training you are going to provide pairs of faces to the nets: one to each copy, then the single loss layer on top of the two copies can compare the high-dimensional vectors representing the two faces and compute a loss according to a "same/not same" label associated with this pair.
Hence, you only need the duplication for the training. In test time ('deploy') you are going to have a single net providing you with a semantically meaningful high dimensional representation of faces.
For a more advance Siamese architecture and loss see this thread.
On the other hand, you might want to consider the approach described in Oren Tadmor, Yonatan Wexler, Tal Rosenwein, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Amnon Shashua Learning a Metric Embedding for Face Recognition using the Multibatch Method (arXiv 2016). This approach is more efficient and easy to implement than pair-wise losses over image pairs.
I was working on webots which is an environment used to model, program and simulate mobile robots. Basically i have a small robot with a VGA camera, and it looks for simple blue coloured patterns on white walls of a small lego maze and moves accordingly
The method I used here was
Obtain images of the patterns from webots and save it in a location
in PC.
Detect the blue pattern, form a square enclosing the pattern
with atleast 2 edges of the pattern being part of the boundary of the
square.
Resize it to 7x7 matrix(using nearest neighbour
interpolation algorithm)
The input to the network is nothing but the red pixel intensities of each of the 7x7 image(when i look at the blue pixel through a red filter it appears black so). The intensities of each pixel is extracted and the 7x7 matrix is then converted it to a 1D vector i.e 1x49 which is my input to the neural network. (I chose this characteristic as my input because it is 'relatively' less difficult to access this information using C and webots.)
I used MATLAB for this offline training method and I used a slower learning rate(0.06) to ensure parameter convergence and tested it on large and small datasets(1189 and 346 respectively). On all the numerous times I have tried, the network fails to classify the pattern.(it says the pattern belongs to all the 4 classes !!!! ) . There is nothing wrong with the program as I tested it out on the simpleclass_dataset in matlab and it works almost perfectly
Is it possible that the neural network fails to learn the function because of really poor data? (by poor data i mean that the datapoints corresponding to one sample of one class are very close to another sample belonging to a different class or something of that sort). Or can the neural network fail because of very poor feature descriptors?
Can anyone suggest a simpler method to extract features from the image(I am now shifting to MATLAB as I am now only concerned with simulations in webots and not the real robot). What sort of features can I choose? The patterns are very simple (L,an inverted L and its reflected versions are the 4 patterns)
Neural networks CAN fail to learn a function; this is most often caused by employing a network topology which is too simple to model the necessary function. A classic example of this case is attempting to learn an XOR function using a perceptron classifier, although it can even happen in multilayer neural nets sometimes; especially for complex tasks like image recognition. See my previous answer for a rough guide on how to select neural network parameters (ignore the convolution stuff if you want, although I would highly recommened looking into convolutional neural networks if you are still having problems).
It is a possiblity that there is too little seperability between classes, although I doubt that this is the case given your current features. Is there a reason that your network needs to allow an image to be four classifications simultaneously? If not, then perhaps you could classify the input as the output with the highest activation instead of all those with high activations.
If I've understood correctly, when training neural networks to recognize objects in images it's common to map single pixel to a single input layer node. However, sometimes we might have a large picture with only a small area of interest. For example, if we're training a neural net to recognize traffic signs, we might have images where the traffic sign covers only a small portion of it, while the rest is taken by the road, trees, sky etc. Creating a neural net which tries to find a traffic sign from every position seems extremely expensive.
My question is, are there any specific strategies to handle these sort of situations with neural networks, apart from preprocessing the image?
Thanks.
Using 1 pixel per input node is usually not done. What enters your network is the feature vector and as such you should input actual features, not raw data. Inputing raw data (with all its noise) will not only lead to bad classification but training will take longer than necessary.
In short: preprocessing is unavoidable. You need a more abstract representation of your data. There are hundreds of ways to deal with the problem you're asking. Let me give you some popular approaches.
1) Image proccessing to find regions of interest. When detecting traffic signs a common strategy is to use edge detection (i.e. convolution with some filter), apply some heuristics, use a threshold filter and isolate regions of interest (blobs, strongly connected components etc) which are taken as input to the network.
2) Applying features without any prior knowledge or image processing. Viola/Jones use a specific image representation, from which they can compute features in a very fast way. Their framework has been shown to work in real-time. (I know their original work doesn't state NNs but I applied their features to Multilayer Perceptrons in my thesis, so you can use it with any classifier, really.)
3) Deep Learning.
Learning better representations of the data can be incorporated into the neural network itself. These approaches are amongst the most popular researched atm. Since this is a very large topic, I can only give you some keywords so that you can research it on your own. Autoencoders are networks that learn efficient representations. It is possible to use them with conventional ANNs. Convolutional Neural Networks seem a bit sophisticated at first sight but they are worth checking out. Before the actual classification of a neural network, they have alternating layers of subwindow convolution (edge detection) and resampling. CNNs are currently able to achieve some of the best results in OCR.
In every scenario you have to ask yourself: Am I 1) giving my ANN a representation that has all the data it needs to do the job (a representation that is not too abstract) and 2) keeping too much noise away (and thus staying abstract enough).
We usually dont use fully connected network to deal with image because the number of units in the input layer will be huge. In neural network, we have specific neural network to deal with image which is Convolutional neural network(CNN).
However, CNN plays a role of feature extractor. The encoded feature will finally feed into a fully connected network which act as a classifier. In your case, I dont know how small your object is compare to the full image. But if the interested object is really small, even use CNN, the performance for image classification wont be very good. Then we probably need to use object detection(which used sliding window) to deal with it.
If you want recognize small objects on large sized image, you should use "scanning window".
For "scanning window" you can to apply dimention reducing methods:
DCT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform)
PCA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis)
Is there any way I can convert the SURFpoints object, generated by matlab, into a matrix with x and y positions, for feeding into a neural network?
I am a pretty much complete beginner, but from what I can tell, and by looking at documentation, I wasn't sure if there was a way to get SURFpoints into neural networks?
Many thanks,
Hugh
SURFPoints has a field, Location, that is an n x 2 matrix that has the (x,y) coordinates of each SURF point detected in the image.
Note, however, that SURF points have other attributes beside their location (such as scale and orientation). If you only take into account the (x,y) locations, you are throwing away a lot of data.
Also, it's unclear how you would feed this information into a neural network. A neural network, like many other machine learning models, expects a uniform length feature vector of an entity. If your task is something like image classification, you'll have to come up with some way to convert the list of SURF points into a feature vector that captures the properties you want your classifier to care about. Depending on your application, a neural network may or may not be the best way to go. In the context of computer vision and image processing, neural networks these days are more commonly used for unsupervised feature discovery (see "deep learning"). For supervised learning tasks, other models like boosted decision trees and SVMs give better theoretical guarantees and have fared much better in practice.