Alois Knoll

Gradient boosting machines are a family of powerful machine-learning techniques that have shown considerable success in a wide range of practical applications. They are highly customizable to the particular needs of the application, like being learned with respect to different loss functions. This article gives a tutorial introduction into the methodology of gradient boosting methods with a strong focus on machine learning aspects of modeling. A theoretical information is complemented with descriptive examples and illustrations which cover all the stages of the gradient boosting model design. Considerations on handling the model complexity are discussed. Three practical examples of gradient boosting applications are presented and comprehensively analyzed.

Although great progress has been made in generic object detection by advanced deep learning techniques, detecting small objects from images is still a difficult and challenging problem in the field of computer vision due to the limited size, less appearance, and geometry cues, and the lack of large-scale datasets of small targets. Improving the performance of small object detection has a wider significance in many real-world applications, such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and robotics. In this article, the first-ever survey of recent studies in deep learning-based small object detection is presented. Our review begins with a brief introduction of the four pillars for small object detection, including <i>multiscale representation, contextual information, super-resolution, and region-proposal</i>. Then, the collection of state-of-the-art datasets for small object detection is listed. The performance of different methods on these datasets is reported later. Moreover, the state-of-the-art small object detection networks are investigated along with a special focus on the differences and modifications to improve the detection performance comparing to generic object detection architectures. Finally, several promising directions and tasks for future work in small object detection are provided. Researchers can track up-to-date studies on this webpage available at: <uri>https://github.com/tjtum-chenlab/SmallObjectDetectionList</uri>.

As a bio-inspired and emerging sensor, an event-based neuromorphic vision sensor has a different working principle compared to the standard frame-based cameras, which leads to promising properties of low energy consumption, low latency, high dynamic range (HDR), and high temporal resolution. It poses a paradigm shift to sense and perceive the environment by capturing local pixel-level light intensity changes and producing asynchronous event streams. Advanced technologies for the visual sensing system of autonomous vehicles from standard computer vision to event-based neuromorphic vision have been developed. In this tutorial-like article, a comprehensive review of the emerging technology is given. First, the course of the development of the neuromorphic vision sensor that is derived from the understanding of biological retina is introduced. The signal processing techniques for event noise processing and event data representation are then discussed. Next, the signal processing algorithms and applications for event-based neuromorphic vision in autonomous driving and various assistance systems are reviewed. Finally, challenges and future research directions are pointed out. It is expected that this article will serve as a starting point for new researchers and engineers in the autonomous driving field and provide a bird's-eye view to both neuromorphic vision and autonomous driving research communities.

Image restoration aims to reconstruct a sharp image from its degraded counterpart, which plays an important role in many fields. Recently, Transformer models have achieved promising performance on various image restoration tasks. However, their quadratic complexity remains an intractable issue for practical applications. The aim of this study is to develop an efficient and effective framework for image restoration. Inspired by the fact that different regions in a corrupted image always undergo degradations in various degrees, we propose to focus more on the important areas for reconstruction. To this end, we introduce a dual-domain selection mechanism to emphasize crucial information for restoration, such as edge signals and hard regions. In addition, we split high-resolution features to insert multi-scale receptive fields into the network, which improves both efficiency and performance. Finally, the proposed network, dubbed FocalNet, is built by incorporating these designs into a U-shaped backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ten datasets for three tasks, including single-image defocus deblurring, image dehazing, and image desnowing. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/FocalNet.