Title：Eyes in the Dark: Distributed Scene Understanding for Disaster Management

Date and Time: 13：30—15:30, July 31, 2017

Location：ROOM 1013, BUILDING 2A, NO.2 YIKUANG STREET,

HARBIN, HEILONGJIANG, CHINA

Abstract:

Robotic is a great substitute for human to explore the dangerous areas, and will also be a great help for disaster management. Although the rise of depth sensor technologies gives a huge boost to robotic vision research, traditional approaches cannot be applied to disaster-handling robots directly due to some limitations. In this paper, we focus on the 3D robotic perception, and propose a view-invariant Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Model for scene understanding in disaster scenarios. The proposed system is highly distributed and parallel, which is of great help to improve the efficiency of network training. In our system, two individual CNNs are used to, respectively, propose objects from input data and classify their categories. We attempt to overcome the difficulties and restrictions caused by disasters using several specially-designed multi-task loss functions. The most significant advantage in our work is that the proposed method can learn a view-invariant feature with no requirement on RGB data, which is essential for harsh, disordered and changeable environments. Additionally, an effective optimization algorithm to accelerate the learning process is also included in our work. Simulations demonstrate that our approach is robust and efficient, and outperforms the state-of-the-art in several related tasks.

 

Biography: Kaoru Ota was born in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan. She received M.S. degree in Computer Science from Oklahoma State University, USA in 2008, B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Aizu, Japan in 2006, 2012, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor with Department of Information and Electronic Engineering, Muroran Institute of Technology, Japan. From March 2010 to March 2011, she was a visiting scholar at University of Waterloo, Canada. Also she was a Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (JSPS) research fellow with Kato-Nishiyama Lab at Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University, Japan from April 2012 to April 2013. Her research interests include Wireless Networks, Cloud Computing, and Cyber-physical Systems. Dr. Ota has received best paper awards from ICA3PP 2014, GPC 2015, IEEE DASC 2015, IEEE VTC 2016-Fall and FCST 2017. She is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), IEEE Communications Letters, Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications (Springer), Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks, International Journal of Embedded Systems (Inderscience) and Smart Technologies for Emergency Response & Disaster Management (IGI Global), as well as a guest editor of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (leading), IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Network, etc. Also she was a guest editor of IEEE Wireless Communications (2015), IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (2014), and Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks (Old City Publishing) (2014). She was a research scientist with A3 Foresight Program (2011-2016) funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS), NSFC of China, and NRF of Korea.