Paul Baumstarck

IROS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Scalable learning for object detection with GPU hardware

• Adam Coates 0002
• Paul Baumstarck
• Quoc V. Le
• Andrew Y. Ng

We consider the problem of robotic object detection of such objects as mugs, cups, and staplers in indoor environments. While object detection has made significant progress in recent years, many current approaches involve extremely complex algorithms, and are prohibitively slow when applied to large scale robotic settings. In this paper, we describe an object detection system that is designed to scale gracefully to large data sets and leverages upward trends in computational power (as exemplified by Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) technology) and memory. We show that our GPU-based detector is up to 90 times faster than a well-optimized software version and can be easily trained on millions of examples. Using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware, it can recognize multiple object types reliably in just a few seconds per frame.

IJCAI Conference 2007 Conference Paper

• Stephen Gould
• Joakim Arfvidsson
• Adrian Kaehler
• Benjamin Sapp
• Marius Messner
• Gary Bradski
• Paul Baumstarck
• Sukwon Chung

Human object recognition in a physical 3-d environment is still far superior to that of any robotic vision system. We believe that one reason (out of many) for this - one that has not heretofore been significantly exploited in the artificial vision literature - is that humans use a fovea to fixate on, or near an object, thus obtaining a very high resolution image of the bject and rendering it easy to recognize. In this paper, we present a novel method for identifying and tracking objects in multi-resolution digital video of partially cluttered environments. Our method is motivated by biological vision systems and uses a learned "attentive" interest map on a low resolution data stream to direct a high resolution "fovea. " Objects that are recognized in the fovea can then be tracked using peripheral vision. Because object recognition is run only on a small foveal image, our system achieves performance in real-time object recognition and tracking that is well beyond simpler systems.