Find the Assembly Mistakes: Error Segmentation for Industrial Applications

Recognizing errors in assembly and maintenance procedures is valuable for industrial applications, since it can increase worker efficiency and prevent unplanned down-time. Although assembly state recognition is gaining attention, none of the current works investigate assembly error localization. Therefore, we propose StateDiffNet, which localizes assembly errors based on detecting the differences between a (correct) intended assembly state and a test image from a similar viewpoint. StateDiffNet is trained on synthetically generated image pairs, providing full control over the type of meaningful change that should be detected. The proposed approach is the first to correctly localize assembly errors taken from real ego-centric video data for both states and error types that are never presented during training. Furthermore, the deployment of change detection to this industrial application provides valuable insights and considerations into the mechanisms of state-of-the-art change detection algorithms. The code and data generation pipeline are publicly available at: https://timschoonbeek.github.io/error_seg.

Supervised Representation Learning towards Generalizable Assembly State Recognition

Assembly state recognition facilitates the execution of assembly procedures, offering feedback to enhance efficiency and minimize errors. However, recognizing assembly states poses challenges in scalability, since parts are frequently updated, and the robustness to execution errors remains underexplored. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an approach based on representation learning and the novel intermediate-state informed loss function modification (ISIL). ISIL leverages unlabeled transitions between states and demonstrates significant improvements in clustering and classification performance for all tested architectures and losses. Despite being trained exclusively on images without execution errors, thorough analysis on error states demonstrates that our approach accurately distinguishes between correct states and states with various types of execution errors. The integration of the proposed algorithm can offer meaningful assistance to workers and mitigate unexpected losses due to procedural mishaps in industrial settings. The code is available at: https://timschoonbeek.github.io/state_rec

Advancing 6-DoF Instrument Pose Estimation in Variable X-Ray Imaging Geometries

Accurate 6-DoF pose estimation of surgical instruments during minimally invasive surgeries can substantially improve treatment strategies and eventual surgical outcome. Existing deep learning methods have achieved accurate results, but they require custom approaches for each object and laborious setup and training environments often stretching to extensive simulations, whilst lacking real-time computation. We propose a general-purpose approach of data acquisition for 6-DoF pose estimation tasks in X-ray systems, a novel and general purpose YOLOv5-6D pose architecture for accurate and fast object pose estimation and a complete method for surgical screw pose estimation under acquisition geometry consideration from a monocular cone-beam X-ray image. The proposed YOLOv5-6D pose model achieves competitive results on public benchmarks whilst being considerably faster at 42 FPS on GPU. In addition, the method generalizes across varying X-ray acquisition geometry and semantic image complexity to enable accurate pose estimation over different domains. Finally, the proposed approach is tested for bone-screw pose estimation for computer-aided guidance during spine surgeries. The model achieves a 92.41% by the 0.1 ADD-S metric, demonstrating a promising approach for enhancing surgical precision and patient outcomes. The code for YOLOv5-6D is publicly available at https://github.com/cviviers/YOLOv5-6D-Pose

uTRAND: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Traffic Trajectories

Deep learning-based approaches have achieved significant improvements on public video anomaly datasets, but often do not perform well in real-world applications. This paper addresses two issues: the lack of labeled data and the difficulty of explaining the predictions of a neural network. To this end, we present a framework called uTRAND, that shifts the problem of anomalous trajectory prediction from the pixel space to a semantic-topological domain. The framework detects and tracks all types of traffic agents in bird's-eye-view videos of traffic cameras mounted at an intersection. By conceptualizing the intersection as a patch-based graph, it is shown that the framework learns and models the normal behaviour of traffic agents without costly manual labeling. Furthermore, uTRAND allows to formulate simple rules to classify anomalous trajectories in a way suited for human interpretation. We show that uTRAND outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on a dataset of anomalous trajectories collected in a real-world setting, while producing explainable detection results.

IndustReal: A Dataset for Procedure Step Recognition Handling Execution Errors in Egocentric Videos in an Industrial-Like Setting

Although action recognition for procedural tasks has received notable attention, it has a fundamental flaw in that no measure of success for actions is provided. This limits the applicability of such systems especially within the industrial domain, since the outcome of procedural actions is often significantly more important than the mere execution. To address this limitation, we define the novel task of procedure step recognition (PSR), focusing on recognizing the correct completion and order of procedural steps. Alongside the new task, we also present the multi-modal IndustReal dataset. Unlike currently available datasets, IndustReal contains procedural errors (such as omissions) as well as execution errors. A significant part of these errors are exclusively present in the validation and test sets, making IndustReal suitable to evaluate robustness of algorithms to new, unseen mistakes. Additionally, to encourage reproducibility and allow for scalable approaches trained on synthetic data, the 3D models of all parts are publicly available. Annotations and benchmark performance are provided for action recognition and assembly state detection, as well as the new PSR task. IndustReal, along with the code and model weights, is available at: https://github.com/TimSchoonbeek/IndustReal .

Investigating and Improving Latent Density Segmentation Models for Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in Medical Imaging

Data uncertainties, such as sensor noise or occlusions, can introduce irreducible ambiguities in images, which result in varying, yet plausible, semantic hypotheses. In Machine Learning, this ambiguity is commonly referred to as aleatoric uncertainty. Latent density models can be utilized to address this problem in image segmentation. The most popular approach is the Probabilistic U-Net (PU-Net), which uses latent Normal densities to optimize the conditional data log-likelihood Evidence Lower Bound. In this work, we demonstrate that the PU- Net latent space is severely inhomogenous. As a result, the effectiveness of gradient descent is inhibited and the model becomes extremely sensitive to the localization of the latent space samples, resulting in defective predictions. To address this, we present the Sinkhorn PU-Net (SPU-Net), which uses the Sinkhorn Divergence to promote homogeneity across all latent dimensions, effectively improving gradient-descent updates and model robustness. Our results show that by applying this on public datasets of various clinical segmentation problems, the SPU-Net receives up to 11% performance gains compared against preceding latent variable models for probabilistic segmentation on the Hungarian-Matched metric. The results indicate that by encouraging a homogeneous latent space, one can significantly improve latent density modeling for medical image segmentation.

A signal processing interpretation of noise-reduction convolutional neural networks

Encoding-decoding CNNs play a central role in data-driven noise reduction and can be found within numerous deep-learning algorithms. However, the development of these CNN architectures is often done in ad-hoc fashion and theoretical underpinnings for important design choices is generally lacking. Up to this moment there are different existing relevant works that strive to explain the internal operation of these CNNs. Still, these ideas are either scattered and/or may require significant expertise to be accessible for a bigger audience. In order to open up this exciting field, this article builds intuition on the theory of deep convolutional framelets and explains diverse ED CNN architectures in a unified theoretical framework. By connecting basic principles from signal processing to the field of deep learning, this self-contained material offers significant guidance for designing robust and efficient novel CNN architectures.

Probabilistic 3D segmentation for aleatoric uncertainty quantification in full 3D medical data

Uncertainty quantification in medical images has become an essential addition to segmentation models for practical application in the real world. Although there are valuable developments in accurate uncertainty quantification methods using 2D images and slices of 3D volumes, in clinical practice, the complete 3D volumes (such as CT and MRI scans) are used to evaluate and plan the medical procedure. As a result, the existing 2D methods miss the rich 3D spatial information when resolving the uncertainty. A popular approach for quantifying the ambiguity in the data is to learn a distribution over the possible hypotheses. In recent work, this ambiguity has been modeled to be strictly Gaussian. Normalizing Flows (NFs) are capable of modelling more complex distributions and thus, better fit the embedding space of the data. To this end, we have developed a 3D probabilistic segmentation framework augmented with NFs, to enable capturing the distributions of various complexity. To test the proposed approach, we evaluate the model on the LIDC-IDRI dataset for lung nodule segmentation and quantify the aleatoric uncertainty introduced by the multi-annotator setting and inherent ambiguity in the CT data. Following this approach, we are the first to present a 3D Squared Generalized Energy Distance (GED) of 0.401 and a high 0.468 Hungarian-matched 3D IoU. The obtained results reveal the value in capturing the 3D uncertainty, using a flexible posterior distribution augmented with a Normalizing Flow. Finally, we present the aleatoric uncertainty in a visual manner with the aim to provide clinicians with additional insight into data ambiguity and facilitating more informed decision-making.

Towards real-time 6D pose estimation of objects in single-view cone-beam X-ray

Deep learning-based pose estimation algorithms can successfully estimate the pose of objects in an image, especially in the field of color images. 6D Object pose estimation based on deep learning models for X-ray images often use custom architectures that employ extensive CAD models and simulated data for training purposes. Recent RGB-based methods opt to solve pose estimation problems using small datasets, making them more attractive for the X-ray domain where medical data is scarcely available. We refine an existing RGB-based model (SingleShotPose) to estimate the 6D pose of a marked cube from grayscale X-ray images by creating a generic solution trained on only real X-ray data and adjusted for X-ray acquisition geometry. The model regresses 2D control points and calculates the pose through 2D/3D correspondences using Perspective-n-Point(PnP), allowing a single trained model to be used across all supporting cone-beam-based X-ray geometries. Since modern X-ray systems continuously adjust acquisition parameters during a procedure, it is essential for such a pose estimation network to consider these parameters in order to be deployed successfully and find a real use case. With a 5-cm/5-degree accuracy of 93% and an average 3D rotation error of 2.2 degrees, the results of the proposed approach are comparable with state-of-the-art alternatives, while requiring significantly less real training examples and being applicable in real-time applications.

Efficient Out-of-Distribution Detection of Melanoma with Wavelet-based Normalizing Flows

Melanoma is a serious form of skin cancer with high mortality rate at later stages. Fortunately, when detected early, the prognosis of melanoma is promising and malignant melanoma incidence rates are relatively low. As a result, datasets are heavily imbalanced which complicates training current state-of-the-art supervised classification AI models. We propose to use generative models to learn the benign data distribution and detect Out-of-Distribution (OOD) malignant images through density estimation. Normalizing Flows (NFs) are ideal candidates for OOD detection due to their ability to compute exact likelihoods. Nevertheless, their inductive biases towards apparent graphical features rather than semantic context hamper accurate OOD detection. In this work, we aim at using these biases with domain-level knowledge of melanoma, to improve likelihood-based OOD detection of malignant images. Our encouraging results demonstrate potential for OOD detection of melanoma using NFs. We achieve a 9% increase in Area Under Curve of the Receiver Operating Characteristics by using wavelet-based NFs. This model requires significantly less parameters for inference making it more applicable on edge devices. The proposed methodology can aid medical experts with diagnosis of skin-cancer patients and continuously increase survival rates. Furthermore, this research paves the way for other areas in oncology with similar data imbalance issues.