CMU talk: Cross-Modal Localization Through Mutual Information

FRC Seminar: Cross-Modal Localization Through Mutual Information

Speaker: Dr. Alen Alempijevic
ARC Centre for Autonomous Systems
Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems Group
University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Friday October 16, 2009
NSH 1109
12:00pm

Abstract: Relating information originating from disparate sensors observing a given scene is a challenging task, particularly when an appropriate model of the environment or the behaviour of any particular object within it is not available. One possible strategy to address this task is to examine whether the sensor outputs contain information which can be attributed to a common cause. I will present an approach to localise this embedded common information through an indirect method of estimating mutual information between all signal sources. Ability of L1 regularization to enforce sparseness of the solution is exploited to identify a subset of signals that are related to each other, from among a large number of sensor outputs. As opposed to the conventional L2 regularization, the proposed method leads to faster convergence with reduced spurious associations.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Alen Alempijevic is a Research Fellow within the ARC Centre for Autonomous Systems (Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems Group) at the University of Technology Sydney. He earned his BE in Computer Systems and PhD degrees in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Technology Sydney in 2003 and 2009 respectively. He has been a guest researcher at UC Berkeley as part of the 2007 entry into the DARPA Grand Challenge and is currently working on 6DOF localization of an underground miner as part of an ARC Linkage Grant. His research interests are in perception for long term autonomy, distributed sensing in self-reconfiguring modular robots and SLAM for urban search and rescue vehicles.