Brody Huval’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Numerous groups have applied a variety of deep learning techniques to computer vision problems in highway perception scenarios. In this paper, we presented a number of empirical evaluations of recent deep learning advances. Computer vision, combined with deep learning, has the potential to bring about a relatively inexpensive, robust solution to autonomous driving. To prepare deep learning for industry uptake and practical applications, neural networks will require large data sets that represent all possible driving environments and scenarios. We collect a large data set of highway data and apply deep learning and computer vision algorithms to problems such as car and lane detection. We show how existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to perform lane and vehicle detection while running at frame rates required for a real-time system. Our results lend credence to the hypothesis that deep learning holds promise for autonomous driving.

We investigate the use of deep neural networks for the novel task of class generic object detection. We show that neural networks originally designed for image recognition can be trained to detect objects within images, regardless of their class, including objects for which no bounding box labels have been provided. In addition, we show that bounding box labels yield a 1% performance increase on the ImageNet recognition challenge.

Single-word vector space models have been very successful at learning lexical information. However, they cannot capture the compositional meaning of longer phrases, preventing them from a deeper understanding of language. We introduce a recursive neural network (RNN) model that learns compositional vector representations for phrases and sentences of arbitrary syntactic type and length. Our model assigns a vector and a matrix to every node in a parse tree: the vector captures the inherent meaning of the constituent, while the matrix captures how it changes the meaning of neighboring words or phrases. This matrix-vector RNN can learn the meaning of operators in propositional logic and natural language. The model obtains state of the art performance on three different experiments: predicting fine-grained sentiment distributions of adverb-adjective pairs; classifying sentiment labels of movie reviews and classifying semantic relationships such as cause-effect or topic-message between nouns using the syntactic path between them.

Recent advances in 3D sensing technologies make it possible to easily record color and depth images which together can improve object recognition. Most current methods rely on very well-designed features for this new 3D modality. We in-troduce a model based on a combination of convolutional and recursive neural networks (CNN and RNN) for learning features and classifying RGB-D images. The CNN layer learns low-level translationally invariant features which are then given as inputs to multiple, fixed-tree RNNs in order to compose higher order fea-tures. RNNs can be seen as combining convolution and pooling into one efficient, hierarchical operation. Our main result is that even RNNs with random weights compose powerful features. Our model obtains state of the art performance on a standard RGB-D object dataset while being more accurate and faster during train-ing and testing than comparable architectures such as two-layer CNNs.