Faculty and students presented the following papers at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024, held in Yokohama, Japan from 13 to 17 May.  

• IDD-X: A Multi-View Dataset for Ego-relative Important Object Localization and Explanation in Dense and Unstructured Traffic – Chirag Parikh; Rohit Saluja, IIT Mandi; C V Jawahar and Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla

Here is the summary of the research work as explained by the authors:

Intelligent vehicle systems require a deep understanding of the interplay between road conditions, surrounding entities, and the ego vehicle’s driving behaviour for safe and efficient navigation. This is particularly critical in developing countries where traffic situations are often dense and unstructured with heterogeneous road occupants. Existing datasets, predominantly geared towards structured and sparse traffic scenarios, fall short of capturing the complexity of driving in such environments.

To fill this gap, we present IDD-X, a large-scale dual-view driving video dataset. With 697K bounding boxes, 9K important object tracks, and 1-12 objects per video, IDD-X offers comprehensive ego-relative annotations for multiple important road objects covering 10 categories and 19 explanation label categories. The dataset also incorporates rearview information to provide a more complete representation of the driving environment.

We also introduce custom-designed deep networks aimed at multiple important object localization and per-object explanation prediction. Overall, our dataset and introduced prediction models form the foundation for studying how road conditions and surrounding entities affect driving behaviour in complex traffic situations.

Link to the paper: https://idd-x.github.io/

The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2024) is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference. This year’s conference theme was “CONNECT+,” reflecting the conference’s aim of helping to build relationships and potential collaborations with participants within and outside their field of study. ICRA brought together robotics researchers, students and industrial partners from around the world to discuss the latest innovations and breakthroughs, highlighting the role of robotics and automation in addressing global challenges. ICRA 2024 had plenary and keynote sessions, contributed paper sessions, workshops and tutorial sessions, forums, expo and exhibitions from our corporate partners, robot competitions and numerous social events.

 Conference page:  https://2024.ieee-icra.org/

May 2024