Mapping Extended Landmarks for Radar SLAM

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using automotive radar sensors can provide enhanced sensing capabilities for autonomous systems. In SLAM applications, with a greater requirement for the environment map, information on the extent of landmarks is vital for precise navigation and path planning. Although object extent estimation has been successfully applied in target tracking, its adaption to SLAM remains unaddressed due to the additional uncertainty of the sensor platform, bias in the odometer reading, as well as the measurement non-linearity. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the Bayesian random matrix approach to estimate the extent of landmarks in radar SLAM. We describe the details for implementation of landmark extent initialization, prediction and update. To validate the performance of our proposed approach we compare with the model-free ellipse fitting algorithm with results showing more consistent extent estimation. We also demonstrate that exploiting the landmark extent in the state update can improve localization accuracy.

Landmark Management in the Application of Radar SLAM

This paper focuses on efficient landmark management in radar based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Landmark management is necessary in order to maintain a consistent map of the estimated landmarks relative to the estimate of the platform's pose. This task is particularly important when faced with multiple detections from the same landmark and/or dynamic environments where the location of a landmark can change. A further challenge with radar data is the presence of false detections. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet efficient rule based solution for radar SLAM landmark management. Assuming a low-dynamic environment, there are several steps in our solution: new landmarks need to be detected and included, false landmarks need to be identified and removed, and the consistency of the landmarks registered in the map needs to be maintained. To illustrate our solution, we run an extended Kalman filter SLAM algorithm in an environment containing both stationary and temporally stationary landmarks. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution is capable of reliably managing landmarks even when faced with false detections and multiple detections from the same landmark.

Ghost Synthetic Aperture with Computational Wavefront Shaping

Although optical synthetic aperture has been generally accepted as preferred technique to achieve very large pupil, the optical cophase of all the gaint subapertures is still a difficult task currently. Besides, the associated adaptive optics combatting the atmospheric turbulence presents hard to conduct. Here we demonstrate an incoherent optical synthetic aperture based on lensless ghost imaging method, in which diffraction-limited imaging can be performed even when the distributed sub-sources is non-cophased. Better yet, the wavefront shaping is computationally implement via an iterative algorithm, rather than actual optical modulation process. These enhancement makes the presented technique far easy under current techniques, and promising in many optcial sensing applications.

Show Me the Whole World: Towards Entire Item Space Exploration for Interactive Personalized Recommendations

User interest exploration is an important and challenging topic in recommender systems, which alleviates the closed-loop effects between recommendation models and user-item interactions. Contextual bandit (CB) algorithms strive to make a good trade-off between exploration and exploitation so that users' potential interests have chances to expose. However, classical CB algorithms can only be applied to a small, sampled item set (usually hundreds), which forces the typical applications in recommender systems limited to candidate post-ranking, homepage top item ranking, ad creative selection, or online model selection (A/B test). In this paper, we introduce two simple but effective hierarchical CB algorithms to make a classical CB model (such as LinUCB and Thompson Sampling) capable to explore users' interest in the entire item space without limiting it to a small item set. We first construct a hierarchy item tree via a bottom-up clustering algorithm to organize items in a coarse-to-fine manner. Then we propose a hierarchical CB (HCB) algorithm to explore users' interest in the hierarchy tree. HCB takes the exploration problem as a series of decision-making processes, where the goal is to find a path from the root to a leaf node, and the feedback will be back-propagated to all the nodes in the path. We further propose a progressive hierarchical CB (pHCB) algorithm, which progressively extends visible nodes which reach a confidence level for exploration, to avoid misleading actions on upper-level nodes in the sequential decision-making process. Extensive experiments on two public recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our methods.

An Adaptive All-Pass Filter for Time-Varying Delay Estimation

The focus of this paper is the estimation of a delay between two signals. Such a problem is common in signal processing and particularly challenging when the delay is non-stationary in nature. Our proposed solution is based on an all-pass filter framework comprising of two elements: a time delay is equivalent to all-pass filtering and an all-pass filter can be represented in terms of a ratio of a finite impulse response (FIR) filter and its time reversal. Using these elements, we propose an adaptive filtering algorithm with an LMS style update that estimates the FIR filter coefficients and the time delay. Specifically, at each time step, the algorithm updates the filter coefficients based on a gradient descent update and then extracts an estimate of the time delay from the filter. We validate our algorithm on synthetic data demonstrating that it is both accurate and capable of tracking time-varying delays.

FedCoin: A Peer-to-Peer Payment System for Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging collaborative machine learning method to train models on distributed datasets with privacy concerns. To properly incentivize data owners to contribute their efforts, Shapley Value (SV) is often adopted to fairly assess their contribution. However, the calculation of SV is time-consuming and computationally costly. In this paper, we propose FedCoin, a blockchain-based peer-to-peer payment system for FL to enable a feasible SV based profit distribution. In FedCoin, blockchain consensus entities calculate SVs and a new block is created based on the proof of Shapley (PoSap) protocol. It is in contrast to the popular BitCoin network where consensus entities "mine" new blocks by solving meaningless puzzles. Based on the computed SVs, a scheme for dividing the incentive payoffs among FL clients with nonrepudiation and tamper-resistance properties is proposed. Experimental results based on real-world data show that FedCoin can promote high-quality data from FL clients through accurately computing SVs with an upper bound on the computational resources required for reaching consensus. It opens opportunities for non-data owners to play a role in FL.

Joint Detection and Tracking for Multipath Targets: A Variational Bayesian Approach

Different from traditional point target tracking systems assuming that a target generates at most one single measurement per scan, there exists a class of multipath target tracking systems where each measurement may originate from the interested target via one of multiple propagation paths or from clutter, while the correspondence among targets, measurements, and propagation paths is unknown. The performance of multipath target tracking systems can be improved if multiple measurements from the same target are effectively utilized, but suffers from two major challenges. The first is multipath detection that detects appearing and disappearing targets automatically, while one target may produce $s$ tracks for $s$ propagation paths. The second is multipath tracking that calculates the target-to-measurement-to-path assignment matrices to estimate target states, which is computationally intractable due to the combinatorial explosion. Based on variational Bayesian framework, this paper introduces a novel probabilistic joint detection and tracking algorithm (JDT-VB) that incorporates data association, path association, state estimation and automatic track management. The posterior probabilities of these latent variables are derived in a closed-form iterative manner, which is effective for dealing with the coupling issue of multipath data association identification risk and state estimation error. Loopy belief propagation (LBP) is exploited to approximate the multipath data association, which significantly reduces the computational cost. The proposed JDT-VB algorithm can simultaneously deal with the track initiation, maintenance, and termination for multiple multipath target tracking with time-varying number of targets, and its performance is verified by a numerical simulation of over-the-horizon radar.