November 2022

Prof. C V Jawahar and his students presented a paper on New Objects on the Road? No Problem, We’ll Learn Them Too at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022) at Kyoto, Japan from 23 – 27 October. The authors of this paper are C V Jawahar; Deepak Kumar Singh; Rohit Saluja; Anbumani Subramanian; K J Joseph, IIT Hyderabad; Vineeth N Balasubramanian, IIT Hyderabad; Chetan Arora, IIT Delhi; Shyam Nandan Rai IIITH and Politecnico di Torino, Italy.

Research work as explained by the authors:

Object detection plays an essential role in providing localization, path planning, and decision making capabilities in autonomous navigation systems. However, existing object detection models are trained and tested on a fixed number of known classes. This setting makes the object detection model difficult to generalize well in real-world road scenarios while encountering an unknown object. We address this problem by introducing our framework that handles the issue of unknown object detection and updates the model when unknown object labels are available. Next, our solution includes three major components that address the inherent problems present in the road scene datasets. The novel components are a) Feature-Mix that improves the unknown object detection by widening the gap between known and unknown classes in latent feature space, b) Focal regression loss handling the problem of improving small object detection and intra-class scale variation, and c) Curriculum learning further enhances the detection of small objects. We use Indian Driving Dataset (IDD) and Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD) dataset for evaluation. Our solution provides state-of-the-art performance on open-world evaluation metrics. We hope this work will create new directions for open-world object detection for road scenes, making it more reliable and robust autonomous systems. 

IROS is one of the largest and most impacting robotics research conferences worldwide. It provides an international forum for the international robotics research community to explore the frontier of science and technology in intelligent robots and smart machines. The theme of IROS 2022 was “Embodied AI for a Symbiotic Society’’. In addition to technical sessions and multimedia presentations, IROS conferences also had panel discussions, forums, workshops, tutorials, exhibits, and technical tours to enrich the fruitful discussions among conference attendees.

Conference page: https://iros2022.org/